Hi Craig,
As an ETL
language, I really really like SAS. IMO, I can do much more complex data transformations using SAS than DataStage, especially OOTB. So as a
language it's rock solid, and has been used in major, large datawarehousing projects around the world.
However, there's the old saying "
If all you've got in your toolbox is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail". Since I have much more experience with SAS, I'm trying to be patient with DataStage. But DS is growing on me
, and this forum is fantastic. Thank you to all the Premium Posters, and other gurus...
As for SAS' ETL
tool, I don't really like it. I find I'm always fighting with it to get it to generate the code I want, code that I could knock out much quicker since 1) I know the language, and 2) I've got a lot of reusable code in my "kitbag" over the years.
I'm sure the SAS ETL tool will continue to improve, but I think it's 2-3 years from maturity.
The big difference between the SAS ETL tool (Data Integration Studio) and DS is that DI Studio is a code generator, analogous to Visual Studio or Frontpage. If you could write the code "by hand" (and wanted to), there is NO difference between doing that and what the tool provides. And there are a lot of hooks in DI Studio to augment or replace the generated code with hand written code. AFAIK, this functionality is more limited in DS (except for sequence jobs). But, I'm only familiar with DS 7.5 Server; perhaps things are more customizable in 8.x or Parallel.
Regards,
Scott