Thanks Jeff for the Article,

I found it very interesting and also have some fun at reading it.

I think all depends of the scope of a project and in the business strategy and philosophy of the company. There are a lot of good ETL tools in the market, some of them are open source, and like most of the open source products they have a steep learning curve.

I have a nice experience with the Pentaho Data Integration (aka Kettle) and we could deliver good solutions to small size companies, who wanted to make use of their data and have a small budget. The disadvantage was that we paid the effort to learn the tools (time and money).

Right now I am involved in several projects, all of them with the complete Microsoft BI suite, and I can say that these tools make my life easier. The aspect that I like the most is the integration between the tools. For instance, how easy is to schedule and build execution logics for SSIS Packages using SQL Server Agent Jobs.

But: "All magic comes with a price" (Rumplestiltskin)