I think you're describing ELT, an approach that I agree with and try to implement as often as possible. I think that's orthogonal to the occasional need to use

I think you're describing ELT, an approach that I agree with and try to implement as often as possible. I think that's orthogonal to the occasional need to use SQL to extract source data. And it's hard to beat the performance of RDBMS for your transformations. It's almost their whole raison d'être.