Working on a Data Warehouse project, the guy that gave us the tutorial advised that we stick to using SQL queries over defining a lot of data flow transformations, citing points like it’ll consume a lot of memory on the ETL box so we’d rather leave the processing to the DB box. Is this really advisable? Where’s the balance between relying on GUI tools over executing a bunch of SQL scripts on your Integration package?
And honestly, I’d like to avoid writing SQL queries as much as I can. (but that’s beside the point. I’d really like to look at this objectively.)
The answer is: it depends, but you want to pick one or the other for any given job and avoid mixing the two where possible.
Generally, it’s best to either do everything possible within the tool or do everything possible within stored procedure code. When you have significant amounts of logic split between layers the system becomes harder to trace and debug.
Where the tool can do the transformations without the data flows becoming awkward and convoluted you could use the tool and try to have little or no logic in queries. This means that one single layer has the business logic and it should be fairly obvious where to find it. However, ETL tools tend to handle highly complex transformations relatively poorly. The sweet spot for this type of approach is on systems where you have a large number of data sources but relatively simple transformations.
If you have relatively complex transformations you may be better off putting all the business logic and transformation into a layer of stored procedures. SQL code is better at implementing complex transformations in a maintainable way – I have it on fairly good authority that around half of all data warehouse projects in the banking and insurance sectors use this type of architecture for precisely that reason.
In this case the ETL tool can be used to implement relatively dumb data copies. Source data can be copied into staging areas essentially verbatim and then picked up by a body of stored procedure code that does the ETL. The ETL tool can be used for data copies, bulk load operations, logging, scheduling and other framework tasks.
In either case you’re best off picking one approach. Otherwise, you can end up with business logic spread across extraction layers, database views, data flows, and stored procedure code. Logic spread across multiple layers is much harder to test.
When all of the logic is (for example) contained within stored procedures or focussed ETL transformation jobs you can unit test a given transformation in isolation. The clarity in design also helps with maintenance and auditing.