When the resource governer hits the standard edition we will be encouraged to move along.

DTS Minor Rant Warning:

BTW we still use DTS - despite having several books at work on SSIS that our key people have read at one point or another.

Thus far we have found DTS easier and more intuitive: SSIS takes a heap longer to achieve what comes intuitively in DTS, and this despite having no DTS documentation at all.

Why? Personal view - possibly a bit of a caricature but saying this to underscore a trend line not denigrate valid outliers - SSIS is in effect attempting to turn .NET application developers into DBAs raher than an attempt to provide a productivity framework that leverages the way DBAs handle data.

If I were to buy software from a sql focused company (e.g. RedGate) as a DBA I expect to be able to use their products directly - i.e. expect their software to enhance rapid-fire set based thinking out of the box - with no need to stop and translate anything into an alternate paradigm in order to "keep up" with the latest trends.

Personal view is .NET is coat-tailing the fundamental success of T-SQL rather than leavarging it by a demonstrable factor of "X". What I want is a product that delivers an "X" factor without having to change the way that I think - which is already carefully tuned around the foundational driver of T-SQL.

Are we squeezing DBA productivity through an unnecessary energy consuming vortex - in order to achieve a marketing target? Is there a productivity target? Solving pedantic application specific puzzles and side-isses does not add to my productivity as a DBA.

We are in the process of moving to a competitor to SSIS because we see MS taking the wrong fork in the road - DBAs should not have to leave a development environment in order to work in a foreign environment built for application development and then like the proverbial Humpty Dumpty, have to glue everything back together again better than new.