I work in Healthcare and we use SAS to Extract and Transform medical and pharmacy claims data for use in downstream reporting applications.  For a given Report Request(usually 40 are running at a time) we have to extract from various DBMS's and transform the data. Once completed with this ET step, the data is over 100 gig in aggregated form(SAS Tables). This data is indexed and optimized for report consumption.  We don't have to go back to the database after we have extracted the data. To me using ReST doesn't make much sense in this situation as XML is not very efficient for large data volumes.  But I thought I would ask to see what the rest of the Programmers' world thinks.
Is ReST useful in Read/Write Operations that involve over 100 Gig
rest;etl