Lucky for me, I have the opportunity to work with more than one ETL tool in my daily work. In the far past, I worked much with DTS and PL/SQL packages (which is an ETL, but not exactly a tool). Nowadays I work both with SSIS and Informatica so I can compare them in several aspects. I don't think that one is better than the other. It's just that they have different approaches to the ETL mechanism. Anyway, I always expect that the data transformations will behave the same in every tool and I found one transformation that behaves differently between the tools - the Router.

The Informatica's Router, if you're not familiar with, receives a data row and routes it a specific data flow. Its parallel transformation in SSIS is the Conditional Split. As I said, I always thought that they behave the same. In both transformations you provide boolean expressions that determine where the row will be routed. The difference is that in SSIS, "each input row can be sent to only one output, that being the output for the first condition that evaluates to true" (from SSIS's documentation). In programmer's words, it behaves like switch-case statement with break in each condition. In Informatica, "If a row meets more than one group filter condition, the Integration Service passes this row multiple times" (from Informatica's documentation). Back to the programmer's language, it's like switch-case statement with no break inside the conditions.

If you know other transformation that behaves different between ETL tools, I'll be happy to know.

We're now starting to work with OBIEE (aka Siebel Analytics) as our main reporting tool. Our vision is to completely replace it with the old Oracle Discoverer, who will be soon out of Oracle's support. As I'll go on and on with OBIEE, I'll post here things you might want to know. Even if you don't work with this tool you can open your mind and get familiar with new stuff.

My first experience with OBIEE - the installation, was not a great fun. The main problem was the error: Oracle Business Intelligence is not supported on this Windows version. Oracle Business Intelligence is only supported on Windows XP x86, Windows 2003 x86, Windows 2003 AMD64, Windows 2003 EM64T, Windows Vista x86, Windows Vista AMD64, Windows Vista EM64T, and Windows 2000 x86.

The problem is that the installation can't find the windows version because systeminfo is not working. Try to run c:\windows\system32\systeminfo.exe. If you get an error about framedyn.dll, this is exactly the problem. Copy this file from the wbem sub-directory to the system32 directory. Try to run again systeminfo and you'll see it's running. Make sure the PATH environment variable contains the system32 directory and that's it.

Two weeks ago I did a talk about SCD. Here is the presentation.
I think that even if you're doing BI (design or development) for quite a while you'll find this presention resourceful and maybe you'll learn a thing or two...
Have a nice learning!