What is Informatica PowerCenter?

What is Informatica? 

Informatica is introduced as a software development company in the market. It provides a complete data integration solution and data management system. It launched multiple products that mainly focused on data integration. 

What is Informatica PowerCenter?

PowerCenter is an ETL tool provided by the Informatica. It extracts the data from different sources, transform them and then load the data into data warehouse. 

Suppose you have different sources of data and you want to extract it. For this you need an ETL tool to help you. It will merge the data from different sources for you. Raw data is not useful and may contain some anomalies. To remove these anomalies we transform the data into desired format. Transformation also helps in doing some calculations. After the data is transformed we need to store it in destination. Now data can be stored in any format. It can be in database format or it can be in spreadsheet format. All these operation is done by Informatica PowerCenter.

Architecture

Lets understand different components of PowerCenter and their usage.

Repository

It contains the metadata of the data. Repository cannot directly access Client Side tools. Repository Manager as a intermediator is used here. 

Metadata stored here contains source and target definitions.

Sources

The data from different origin are taken from sources. Data can be in flat file structure , xml format, json format or in relational database format.

Target

After the extract and transformation is done data needs to be loaded in desired targets. Target can be in any format like database or comma separated file, excel file etc.

Domain

 

An Informatica domain is a collection of nodes and services. A node is the logical representation of a machine in a domain. Services for the domain include the Service Manager that manages all domain operations and a set of application services that represent server-based functionality.

There are basically two main tools of PowerCenter

1. Server Side Tools

2. Client Side Tools

Client Side Tools

1. Repository Manager

It is a client side tool used to administrate the repositories. With this we can create, edit, delete repositories , folders or subfolders.

Repository Manager also handles the access permission of these folders and subfolders. 

Letter 'R' represents Repository Manager

2. Designer

Designer is used to different task such as to load the source and target metadata, create a mapping etc.

It has five components

• Source Designer - It is used to import or create the source metadata from different sources. 
• Target Designer - It creates the metadata for the target table 
•  Transformation Developer - Used to create reusable transformation
•  Mapplet Designer - It creates reusable mappings 
•  Mapping Designer - Used to create the mapping.

Mapping is the flow of data from source to target.

Transformation changes data into desired format for eg date format can be in DD/MM/YYYY and we need date in MM/DD/YYYY format. 

3. Workflow Manager

It gives the instructions to the integration service to perform the data load. One can create different tasks and workflows with this tool.

It has three components

• Task Developer- It is used to create reusable tasks. Only email, command, session  can be reused. Other tasks cannot be reused. 
•  Worklet Designer - We can create resuable workflows with this. 
•  Workflow Designer - It is used to create workflows. Many tasks like session, event wait, control, decision can be used here.

4. Workflow Monitor

It monitors the workflow and tasks. Also it checks if the data is loaded into target or not. How much time is taken by the workflow and task is displayed here. It generates log file to get error details. Success or failure status is also displayed here.

 

Server Side Tools

The following tools are present in server side

1. Repository Service 

As the name suggests it provides services to the repository. Repository Service communicates with repository of PowerCenter. Main job of repository service is to read the metadata from the repository and write the data into the repository. It interacts with integration service to provide the metadata details.

2. Integration Service

It is a process residing on server side. It waits for the tasks to get assigned to them for execution. When Workflow gets executed the integrate service gets notification to run the workflow. Then it reads the workflow to know the details like which task it has to execute, at what time workflow needs to be executed.

ETL process is done by the Integration Service in Informatica PowerCenter.