ETL Informatica

What is Informatica?

Informatica is a Software development company, which offers data integration products. If 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.

Informatica Powercenter is used for Data integration. It offers the capability to connect & fetch data from different heterogeneous source and processing of data.

For example, you can connect to an SQL Server Database and Oracle Database both and can integrate the data into a third system.

The latest version of Informatica PowerCenter available is 9.6.0. The different editions for the PowerCenter are

• Standard edition
• Advanced edition
• Premium edition

Typical use cases for Informatica can be

• 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.
• Enterprises setting up their Data Warehouse would require an ETL tool to move data from the Production system to Warehouse.
• Integration of data from various heterogeneous systems like multiple databases and file-based systems can be done using Informatica.
• Informatica can be used as a data cleansing tool.

Why do we need Informatica?

Informatica comes to the picture wherever we have a data system available and at the backend we want to perform certain operations on the data. It can be like cleaning up of data, modifying the data, etc. based on certain set of rules or simply loading of bulk data from one system to another.

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 are also preserved.