What is Informatica?

Informatica is Engine driven ETL tool, from Informatica Corporation, mostly used in Data Integration and Data warehouse enviornment. It is supported on different environments ( UNIX, WINDOWS, MAINFRAME etc).

Informatica Corporation products are:

• Informatica Power Center
• Informatica on demand
• Informatica B2B Data Exchange
• Informatica Data Quality
• Informatica Data Explorer

Informatica Power Center is a single, unified enterprise data integration platform for accessing, discovering, and integrating data from virtually any business system, in any format, and delivering that data throughout the enterprise at any speed.

Key PowerCenter Client Tools:

• Designer Tools
• Workflow Manager
• Workflow Monitor
• Repository Manager
• Administrator Console

Client to Server communication flow looks something like this:

• The PowerCenter client sends a request to Repository Server.
• The Repository Server verifies the connectivity information of the target database
• The Repository Server starts a Repository agent Process
• The Repository Server uses a Repository agent process to communicate with the Repository.
• The PowerCenter Server process communicates with the repository to run scheduled workflows. When a workflow is run manually the Power Center Server uses the instructions configured in the mapping (stored in the Repository) to read , transform and write data.

Individual tools will be explored later...