Informatica is a powerful ETL tool from Informatica Corporation, a leading provider of enterprise data integration software and ETL software.
In Informatica, all the Metadata information about source systems, target systems, and transformations are stored in the Informatica repository. Informatica's Power Center Client and Repository Server access this repository to store and retrieve metadata. Note: To know more about Metadata
Consider a Bank that has got many branches throughout the world. In each branch, data may be stored in different source systems like oracle, sql server, Teradata, etc. When the Bank decides to integrate its data from several sources for its management decisions, it may choose one or more systems like oracle, sql server, Teradata, etc. as its data warehouse target. Many organizations prefer Informatica to do that ETL process, because Informatica is more powerful in designing and building data warehouses. It can connect to several sources and targets to extract meta data from sources and targets, transform and load the data into target systems.
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This is where all the metadata information is stored in the Informatica suite. The Power Center Client and the Repository Server would access this repository to retrieve, store and manage metadata.
Informatica client is used for managing users, identifying source and target systems definitions, creating mapping and mapplets, creating sessions and run workflows etc.
This repository server takes care of all the connections between the repository and the Power Center Client.
The Power Center server does the extraction from the source and then loading data into targets.
Source Analyzer, Mapping Designer and Warehouse Designer are tools that reside within the Designer wizard. Source Analyzer is used for extracting metadata from source systems. Mapping Designer is used to creating a mapping between sources and targets. Mapping is a pictorial representation of the flow of data from source to target. Warehouse Designer is used for extracting metadata from target systems or metadata can be created in the Designer itself.
The Power Center's data cleansing technology improves data quality by validating, correctly naming, and standardization of address data. A person's address may not be the same in all source systems because of typos and postal code, city name may not match with the address. These errors can be corrected by using data cleansing process and standardized data can be loaded in target systems (data warehouse).
Transformations help to transform the source data according to the requirements of the target system. Sorting, Filtering, Aggregation, Joining are some of the examples of transformation. Transformations ensure the quality of the data being loaded into the target and this is done during the mapping process from source to target.
Workflow helps to load the data from source to target in a sequential For example, if the fact tables are loaded before the lookup tables, then the target system will pop up an error message since the fact table is violating the foreign key validation. To avoid this, workflows can be created to ensure the correct flow of data from source to target.
This monitor is helpful in monitoring and tracking the workflows created in each Power Center Server.
This component helps to extract data and metadata from ERP systems like IBM's MQSeries, Peoplesoft, SAP, Siebel etc. and other third party applications.
This component helps to extract data and metadata from ERP systems like IBM's MQSeries, Peoplesoft, SAP, Siebel etc. and other third party applications.
Informatica Power Exchange as a stand alone service or along with Power Center, helps organizations leverage data by avoiding manual coding of data extraction programs. Power Exchange supports batch, real time and changed data capture options in main frame(DB2, VSAM, IMS etc.,), mid range (AS400 DB2 etc.,), and for relational databases (oracle, sql server, db2 etc) and flat files in unix, linux and windows systems.
This helps to transfer large amount of encrypted and compressed data over LAN, WAN, through Firewalls, tranfer files over FTP, etc.
Metadata Exchange enables organizations to take advantage of the time and effort already invested in defining data structures within their IT environment when used with Power Center. For example, an organization may be using data modeling tools, such as Erwin, Embarcadero, Oracle designer, Sybase Power Designer etc for developing data models. Functional and technical team should have spent much time and effort in creating the data model's data structures(tables, columns, data types, procedures, functions, triggers etc). By using meta deta exchange, these data structures can be imported into power center to identifiy source and target mappings which leverages time and effort. There is no need for informatica developer to create these data structures once again.
Power Analyzer provides organizations with reporting facilities. PowerAnalyzer makes accessing, analyzing, and sharing enterprise data simple and easily available to decision makers. PowerAnalyzer enables to gain insight into business processes and develop business intelligence. With PowerAnalyzer, an organization can extract, filter, format, and analyze corporate information from data stored in a data warehouse, data mart, operational data store, or otherdata storage models. PowerAnalyzer is best with a dimensional data warehouse in a relational database. It can also run reports on data in any table in a relational database that do not conform to the dimensional model.
Superglue is used for loading metadata in a centralized place from several sources. Reports can be run against this superglue to analyze meta data.
Power Mart is a departmental version of Informatica for building, deploying and managing data warehouses and data marts. The power center is used for corporate enterprise data warehouse and power mart is used for departmental data warehouses like data marts. Power Center supports global repositories and networked repositories and it can be connected to several sources. Power Mart supports a single repository and it can be connected to fewer sources when compared to Power Center. Power Mart can extensively grow to an enterprise implementation and it is easy for developer productivity through a codeless environment. Note: This is not a complete tutorial on Informatica. Please visit http://tekslate.com/tutorials/informatica/ for Informatica Tutorials
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