Introduction

The word “Data” is living up to its height from the last ten years. Its difficult to think a software activity without the involvement of data. Unarguably, data has established the center nib of “informational democracy” which makes the IT world and technology revolve around it. Data warehousing is one of the field which does the task of sheltering the data from multiple sources and logically manipulate it, if required. Keep a note that the data sources may be of varied platforms – which makes the philosophy a little cribbing one.

Data warehousing process sees through multiple stages in its life cycle. From staging to the warehouse loading, the raw data goes through series of refinement. The life cycle can be practically realized with the help of DWH development tools. The tools follow the usual and expected ETL protocol – which stands for Extraction, Transformation and Loading. In short, data extraction is a challenge and transformation is a skill, but loading is a success. One of the most successful DWH development tools is Informatica ETL. The tool is a primary product from a company known as Informatica. In this article, we shall discuss the existence of Informatica in the software field.

Informatica – The company

Informatica Corporation, “The Data Integration Company” was founded in the year 1993 by Diaz Nesamoney, Gaurav Dhillon and Sohaib Abbasi. The headquarters of the company are based out in Redwood city, California (U.S.A.). Informatica started off with the focus on data integration products and truly, the objective has been carried out through the time leading to huge partner/customer base and market success. The data solution offerings from Informatica include –

Data warehousing, Data quality, migration, Legacy retirement, synchronization of date, replication, consolidation, management of Test Data, archiving, Complex event processing, B2B data exchange, Master data management, and identity resolution. In the year 2006, Information stepped into cloud business with its first cloud data integration tool.

Informatica – The tool

Informatica is an ETL tool which supports the ETL life cycle and data integration in a warehouse environment setup. It is a comprehensible tool which provides an interface to design the process flow for data extraction, staging, transformation and loading. The process flow diagrams or mappings can be designed by dragging, dropping and connecting the business objects (entities) and scheduling it appropriately depending upon the application workload and user activity. The processes execute automatically on the scheduled time, while the complete activity is taken care by the product. Minimal hum intervention is required only when a scheduled job fails or encounters an ambiguous scenario. The Information PowerCenter Architecture is used to drive the ETL cycle in the product.

Information PowerCenter Architecture

The architecture enables the environment to extract the data, transform it and load into an taregt enterprise warehouse. The key components in the architecture are –

• PowerCenter Repository contains the metadata tables accessed by power center applications.
• PowerCenter Repository server manages the client connections, data queries, and transactions to the repository.
• PowerCenter client is responsible for the users, sources, targets and process flows. It works with sub components like Repository Manager, Repository Server Administration Console, Designer, Workflow Manager, and Workflow Monitor.
• PowerCenter server is responsible for the complete ETL process. It extracts the data, does the transformation for the erroneous data and loads into the target database.
• The Power Center can work with variety of data sources and targets. It may be a RDBMS, flat files, XMLs, excels, an external application like SAP, JDE or Siebel, or even an identified remote source. The tool offers a great compatibility to work with heterogeneous data sources in a single implementation and jointly access the raw data to give it a meaningful shape.

Informatica Certifications

Informatica recognizes the product expertise through certifications. The certifications not only add differentiate the professionals in the community, but also raise the bar of credibility and productivity. Informatica offers three levels of certifications namely,

• Informatica Certified Associate tests the product understanding as a team member
• Informatica Certified Professional tests the product applications as a senior team member
• Informatica Certified Expert tests the product expertise as a team leader

 

Certifications aim at testing the professionals on their product knowledge and working experience relevant to their acquaintance with the product. These certifications help the DWH professionals to showcase the expertise and pave a better path in their career.

 

Further information on Informatica certifications can be found at

• https://www.informatica.com/us/services-and-training/certification.

 

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, Informatica is one of the most widely used ETL tool in the industry. The wide spectrum of features and the vendor trust has given cutting edge over the contemporaries in the recent years. Easy provisioning, user friendly IDE and unconstrained compatibility with legacy data systems has accredited best for the tool.

Suggested references

Readers can continue to refer more details on Informatica as a tool and technology from the below links.

• https://informatica.techtiks.com/beginners.html
• https://www.rittmanmead.com/2008/07/getting-started-with-informatica-powercenter-811/
• https://www.etl-developer.com/category/informatica/
• https://etllabs.com/informatica/

Web tutorials

Readers can also follow web tutorials on youtube

• https://www.youtube.com/user/DISoln
• https://www.youtube.com/user/BharatiDWConsultancy
• https://www.youtube.com/user/InformaticaCorp
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10Kp_6iJ668

 

You can find all the upcoming training programs of Informatica @ https://www.bookmytrainings.com/technical-crm-etl-erp/technical-informatica

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