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November 20, 2003
The Agony of DTS
I've always like DTS. That's because I've only ever had to use it for fairly simple tasks. If I needed triggers and multiple conditional operations and whatnot, I've hand coded it in ksh or Perl. I've also had the protection of the Rules Editor for Essbase that allows me to visually program column joins, appends, substitutions, splits and order rearrangements. Those days are gone. I'm going to have to make DTS do some heavy lifting.
In order to manage the metadata for dimension builds and data loads into Analysis Services cubes, DTS is going to be the master of all tasks. I started some of that work yesterday in class. Can you say tedium? At first, I was just giggling at the kind of billing I'm going to be able to do because such things will take so much time. And yet I heard others griping with more experience doing certain things with SQL Stored Procedures. Is it just me or does passing parameters to a query language and then debugging it with breakpoints sound like a perversion? I suppose if it's going to be a language, one might as well, but I've been doing query stuff through APIs for the past seven years, and doing my ETL through hand coding. A double reversal.
The good news is that DTS itself is supposed to be transformed with the arrival of Yukon. They are actually going after Informatica, Sagent and Ascential. That's all good as far as I'm concerned. It can only get better.
Meanwhile, I'm trying to figure out how to encapsulate Perl into its processes, you know what I mean?
Posted by mbowen at November 20, 2003 07:37 AM
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