What is Informatica?
Informatica is a Software development company, which offers data integration products. It
offers products for ETL, data masking, data Quality, data replica, data virtualization, master data
management, etc.
Informatica Powercenter ETL/Data Integration tool is a most widely used tool and in the
common term when we say Informatica, it refers to the Informatica PowerCenter tool for ETL.
Context behind ETL:
Every company now-a-days processes a huge set of data. They come from varied sources and needs to
be processed to give insightful information for making business decisions. But quite often such data has
following challenges:
Large companies with lots of data: Such huge chunk of data can be in any format. They would be
available in multiple databases and many unstructured files.
This data must be collated, combined, compared, and made to work as a seamless whole. But
the different databases don’t communicate well!
Many organizations have implemented interfaces between these databases:
o Every pair of databases requires a unique interface
o If you change one database, many interfaces may have to be upgraded
Data Integration is the solution for all such problems. Data Integration technologies allow data from
different databases and formats to communicate with each other.
Informatica uses the Extract, Transform & Load (ETL) architecture which is the most popular architecture
to perform data integration. So it is imperative that we understand whatETL is and how Informatica
performs ETL to solve such business problems.
What is ETL?
ETL is a type of data integration and involves an architecture that extracts, transforms, and then loads
data in target database or file. It is the foundation of data warehouse.
Why Informatica is the best solution?
Informatica PowerCenter is a premium data integration solution available today. The reason it provides
the best solution in large enterprises is because it is:
database neutral and hence can communicate with any database
The most powerful data transformations tool. It converts one application’s data to another’s
format
Informatica offers a rich set of features like operations at row level on data, integration of data
from multiple structured, semi-structured or unstructured systems, scheduling of data
operation. It also has the feature of metadata, so the information about the process and data
operations is also preserved.
How Informatica performs ETL:
ETL: Extract
PowerCenter reads data, row by row, from a table (or group of related tables) in a database, or
from a file
This database or file is referred to as the source
The structure of the source is contained in a source definition object.
ETL: Transform
Informatica PowerCenter converts the rows into a format the second (target) system will be able
to use
The logic for this conversion is defined in transformation objects
ETL: Load
Informatica PowerCenter writes data, row by row, to a table (or group of related tables) in a
database, or to a file
This database or file is referred to as the target
The structure of the target is contained in a target definition object
Real time Use cases of Informatica:
1. Data Migration:
An organization migrating from existing legacy system like mainframe to a new database
system. So the migration of its existing data into a system can be performed.
2. Application Integration:
Integration of data from various heterogeneous systems like multiple databases and file-
based systems can be done using Informatica.
Company A purchases Company B. So to achieve the benefits of consolidation, Company
B’s billing system must be integrated into Company A’s billing system which can be
easily done by Informatica
3. Data Warehousing
Enterprises setting up their Data Warehouse would require an ETL tool to move data
from the Production system to Warehouse.
4. Informatica can be used as a data cleansing tool.
Informatica Key Metrics:
Following are a few stats that reflect the growth in the demand for Informatica:
2016 Revenue : $1.06 billion, more than the combined revenue of Abinitio, datastage, SSIS, and
other ETL tools
7-year Annual CAGR: 30%
Partners : 450+
Major SI, ISV, OEM and On-Demand Leaders
Customers: Over 5,000
Customers in 82 countries & direct Presence in 28 countries
# 1 in customer loyalty rankings, 7 years in a row
The above indicator clearly establishes the fact that there is great demand of Informatica across the
globe.
Informatica PowerCenter Components
Informatica PowerCenter tool consists of following services & components
1. Repository Service – Responsible for maintaining Informatica metadata & providing
access of same to other services.
2. Integration Service – Responsible for the movement of data from sources to targets
3. Reporting Service - Enables the generation of reports
4. Nodes – Computing platform where the above services are executed
5. Informatica Designer - Used for creation of mappings between source and target
6. Workflow Manager – Used to create workflows and other task & their execution
7. Workflow Monitor – Used to monitor the execution of workflows
8. Repository Manager – Used to manage objects in repository
