What is Informatica?

Informatica is a ETL tool provided by 'Informatica Corporation', it is used to Extraction, Transformation and Load process all types databases. Now a day’s Informatica is also being used as an Integration tool and it is Service Oriented Architecture.

Informatica is an easy to use tool. It has got a simple visual interface like forms in visual basic. You just need to drag and drop different objects (known as transformations) and design process flow for Data extraction transformation and load. These process flow diagrams are known as mappings. Once a mapping is made, it can be scheduled to run as and when required. In the background Informatica server takes care of fetching data from source, transforming it, & loading it to the target systems/databases/Flat Files.

Informatica can communicate with all major data sources (mainframe/RDBMS/Flat Files/XML/VSM/SAP etc), can move/transform data between them. It can move huge volumes of data in a very effective way, many a times better than even bespoke programs written for specific data movement only. It can throttle the transactions (do big updates in small chunks to avoid long locking and filling the transactional log). It can effectively join data from two distinct data sources (even a xml file can be joined with a relational table). In all, Informatica has got the ability to effectively integrate heterogeneous data sources & converting raw data into useful information.

OVERVIEW:

PowerCenter is Informatica's enterprise-wide data integration platform solution. It is used to access, transform, and integrate data from a large variety of systems and deliver that information to other systems. It enables organizations to create a single, consistent enterprise-wide information resource and get a holistic view of the data.

PowerCenter Options

• Partitioning: using parallel processing on multiprocessor hardware, partitioning optimizes performance by using multi-threaded processes
• Real-time: augments the ability to execute processes on demand and in batch from previous versions
• Data Cleansing: Informatica has partnered with companies such as FirstLogic and Trillium whose core competency is the standardization of name and address information
• Data Profiling: allows Informatica developers and other data warehouse practitioners (with a bit of training) to perform data analysis on source data before building mappings
• Metadata Exchange: provides the ability to easily detect changes between data models or BI tools, and objects in the Informatica repository

INFORMATICA POWERCENTER ARCHITECTURE

Informatica PowerCenter consiste of Client and Server Components are listed below:

·         PowerCenter Client Tools

·         PowerCenter Repository Service

·         PowerCenter Integration Service

·         Analyst Service

·         Model Repository Service

·         Data Integration Service

·         Web Services Hub

·         Metadata Manager Service

·         SAP BW Service

·         Reporting Service

·         Content Management Service

·         Reporting and Dashboards Service

·         PowerExchange Listener Service

·         PowerExchange Logger Service

Major Tools are PowerCenter Client Tools, PowerCenter Repository Service, PowerCenter Integration Service and Administrator Console.