Hi pjcrout,

I'm Scott Currie, the creator of Biml. We're definitely on the same page, as far as the motivation and capabilities. Biml is a full-fledged programming language. Presently we have relational databases, SSIS, and SSAS modeled in Biml. We also have an IDE made just for Biml that has visual designers, powerful code editors, live scripting hosts, and more. It's called Mist.

What we decided to do was make the SSIS subset of the language entirely free through BIDSHelper, and make relational and SSAS modeling available only through the paid product. This was both because the BIDS approach to relational and cubes doesn't lend itself well to Biml-style automation, and because we need to have some value-adds to keep the doors open through license revenue. There are a couple person decades of dev time in the Biml/Mist system with a lot of additional possibilities for future development, so it is something that needs ongoing revenue to support. We don't presently support SSRS with Biml, but we will likely be adding that in the first half of next calendar year.

If you like what you see of Biml so far, also check out transformers (http://www.bimlscript.com/Walkthrough/Details/68) - which allow you to modify existing Biml objects. This lets you build frameworks that modify the code your developers write - automatically apply logging patterns, enforce coding standards, you name it. Transformers are also a Mist-only feature, but if you invest in them, they are insanely powerful. In fact, we use transformers internally within BimlEngine to implement much of the compiler functionality. And with Mist, we allow you to override even our default functionality with your own transformers if you like.

For example, you could write all of your code using a Lookup component, but add a transformer so that all those lookups automatically turn into an Inferred Member / Late Arriving Lookup pattern when you build. If you ever need to change the pattern, just change the transformer file in one location and rebuild. You can even have a debug and a production set of transformers, so that in debug mode you insert extra instrumentation code. Or if you have a heterogeneous server environment, you can have different transformers for building against SSIS 2005 vs SSIS 2008 vs SSIS 2012. We'll have some very exciting examples of transformers published over the next several weeks, so please keep your eyes open for those.

If you have any other questions, please ask away.