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.

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.