[font="Verdana"]One of the recent (i.e. in the last ten years) changes in data warehousing has been a move away from specialised ETL tools like Informatica, Data Stage, etc, and towards letting the RDBMS do the work. This approach has been called ELT (extract, load, transform).

For smaller data warehouses, this makes sense. There's no need to support two disctinct platforms for throwing data around. It's all done in the RDBMS.

Oracle have a product that does that (sorry, can't remember the name), and we use a product at work named Wherescape RED that does the same over the top of SQL Server 2005.

So the database does a lot of work in chopping, changing and reformatting data during the staging process. There's no real presentation layer, as the data just gets posted into another database.

That's a very valid reason to be looking at string operations within an RDBMS, from my perspective.

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