Informatica Architecture

Informatica ETL 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

Sources & Targets

Informatica being an ETL and Data integration tool, you would be always handling and transforming some form of data. The input to our mappings in Informatica is called source system. We import source definitions from the source and then connect to it to fetch the source data in our mappings. There can be different types of sources and can be located at multiple locations. Based upon your requirement the target system can be a relational or flat file system. Flat file targets are generated on the Informatica server machine, which can be transferred later on using ftp.

Relational– these types of sources are database system tables. These database systems are generally owned by other applications which create and maintain this data. It can be a Customer Relationship Management Database, Human Resource Database, etc. for using such sources in Informatica we either get a replica of these datasets, or we get select privileges on these systems.

Flat Files - Flat files are most common data sources after relational databases in Informatica. A flat file can be a comma separated file, a tab delimited file or fixed width file. Informatica supports any of the code pages like ascii or Unicode. To use the flat file in Informatica, its definitions must be imported similar to as we do for relational tables.