Introduction to Informatica

Informatica is an IT firm established by Mr Dillon in California in the year 1995-96. People often refer to Informatica as software, but there are some technical tools developed by Informatica which they intend to mean. Informatica offers various data products like ETL, data migration, data integration, data virtualization, data masking, data replication, and many more.

Software products from Informatica –

1. Power Mart
2. Power Center
3. Power Exchange Connector
    

Power Mart :

1. It is an ETL tool but supports only one repository at a time.
2. It is an outdated tool, and now it is not used in the market.
3. Does not support the main frame and SAP systems.

Features –

1. Business Component Framework (BCF)
2. Management of advanced Sessions
3. Multi-level Security
4. Production Deployment Automation
5. Fault-tolerant Recovery
6. Scalable Pipeline Processing (SPP)
7. Creation of a Session 
8. New Browser Functionality
9. Flat-File Acceleration

Power Center :

Informatica Power Center is available in three different editions –

1. Standard Edition
2. Advanced Edition
3. Real-Time Edition

Features –

1. Power Center is an advanced version of Power Mart.
2. It is used for data integration.
3. It is an ETL tool but supports multiple repositories.
4. Widely used to integrate SAP systems into the device.
5. Power Centre has the power to connect and extract data from a wide variety of sources, like multiple databases and file-based systems.
6. It is a web-enabled application that supports client-server architecture and works on service-oriented architecture.
7. Databases supported are RDBMS, Flat files, XML, and legal system.
8. Supports to development of custom transformation objects and cache management.
9. Support the scheduling of the tasks.
    

Power Exchange Connectors :

1. Power exchange connectors provide the Connectors for Databases and Data Warehouses and also provides support for all major enterprise database and warehouse systems.
2. It provides a connector to Hadoop which support distributed data system architecture.
3. Power exchange connectors also provide connections to several social networking websites like Facebook and Linked In.
4. Provides quick easy and cost-effective solutions to connect the websites and databases to ETL tools like Power Center.

Informatica developed a software tool to perform ETL operations on data, known as Power Center. We can develop three components under Power Center Tools to perform the ETL Process –

1. Mapping
2. Session
3. Workflow

Mapping :

1. It is used to define the flow of data from source to target.
2. Mapping is done with the help of transformation objects.
3. A mapping can consist of one or more session.

Session :

1. It is an object created for a specific mapping object.
2. It is used to specify the connectivity for different source, target, and other databases.
3. Every session should have only one mapping.
4. A session can consist of one or more workflows.

Workflow :

1. It is an object which is a collection of tasks.
2. All the ETL operations and Mapping is listed under workflow operations,
3. Every workflow can have more than one or more session.
    

Uses of Informatica :

• Informatica became popular because most often we have a large amount of Big Data, and we need to perform some backend operations on the data, where the operations can be like cleaning of the data, changing the attributes, modifying the null values, etc.  
• Informatica can be used to migrate the data warehouse form certain legacy system to the cloud environment.
• Informatica offers a huge set of instructions such as integration of various data sources which can be in any form of semi-structured, un-structured, or structured data. 
• Informatica helps in scheduling the data operations in the form of event-based triggers. 
• It also offers cloud-based services, which can help organizations to use it with a minimum amount of setup.
• Informatica also has the feature of metadata. As a result, the information about the process and data operations are also protected.