Hi Steve, Years back I instituted the use of and Operational Data Store or as some say staging area. The initial thought was to use this as a clearing house to build dataflows from an XML based webservice network but it grew. Once data folks knew that there we a place where ETL could be done where the expectation was that you could keep the intermediate tables if you choose, it grew. We have had to institute some controls on who, what, and when to not overload the process, but some in the organization are now using it as a main part of their data strategy.

Why not keep what is reasonable to keep. Much of it could be done in temp tables, but this works nicely.