Learning Informatica PowerCenter 9.x (2014)

Preface

There has to be a motive behind everything, and there is one behind this book too: to present a technology to the readers in its simplest form. The simple thought behind writing this book is to put all the essential ingredients of Informatica, starting from basic things such as downloading, extraction, and installation to working on client tools and high-level aspects, such as scheduling, migration, and so on, in simple words. There are multiple blogs available across the Internet that talk about the Informatica tool but none present end-to-end answers. We have tried to put up all the steps and processes in a systematic manner to help you start learning easily. In this book, you will get a step-by-step procedure for every aspect of the Informatica PowerCenter tool.

Informatica Corporation (Informatica), which is a multi-million dollar company incorporated in February, 1993, is an independent provider of enterprise data integration and data quality software and services. The company enables a variety of complex enterprise data integration products, which include PowerCenter, PowerExchange, enterprise data integration, data quality, master data management, business-to-business (B2B) data exchange, application information life cycle management, complex event processing, ultra messaging, and cloud data integration.

In this book, we are going to learn about the PowerCenter tool from Informatica. PowerCenter is Informatica's most widely-used tool across the globe for various data integration processes. The Informatica PowerCenter tool helps with the integration of data from almost any business system in almost any format. This flexibility of PowerCenter to handle almost any data makes it the most widely used tool in the data integration world.

While writing this book, we have kept in mind the importance of live, practical exposure of the graphical interface of the tool to the audience and so you will notice a lot of screenshots illustrating the steps to help you understand and follow the process. We have arranged the chapters in such a way that we cover all the aspects of the Informatica PowerCenter tool, and we have also made sure they flow properly in order to achieve functionality.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Starting the Development Phase – Using the Designer Screen Basics, talks about the basics of the Informatica PowerCenter Designer client tool. You will learn how to create/import files and tables as the source and target. You will also learn about the basic components of the client screen, such as the toolbar, navigator, workspace, output panel, and status bar. By the end of this chapter, you will have a clear idea of the look and feel of the PowerCenter tool.

Chapter 2, Using the Designer Screen – Advanced, talks about the advanced topics of the Designer screen. It is an extension of Chapter 1, Starting the Development Phase – Using the Designer Screen Basics. In this chapter, we will discuss debuggers, parameters and variables, target loan plan, reusable transformations, and mapplets.

Chapter 3, Implementing SCD – Using Designer Screen Wizards, covers a single but very important aspect of data warehousing, SCD. We will see the implementation of SCD1, SCD2, and SCD3 using wizards. You should be clear with data warehousing concepts to understand this implementation.

Chapter 4, Finishing the Development – Using the Workflow Manager Screen Basics, describes the basics of the Workflow Manager screen. We will get to learn the different options present on the Workflow Manager screen. We will learn how to create session tasks and workflows. We will also see various connections, such as relations, FTP, and so on, that can be created on the Workflow Manager screen.

Chapter 5, Using the Workflow Manager Screen – Advanced, teaches you the advanced concepts of the Workflow Manager screen. This chapter describes the various tasks present on the Workflow Manager screen. We will also see how to create reusable tasks and mapplets. We will learn some very important concepts, such as scheduling, partitioning and parameter files, file list, and incremental aggregation and workflow recovery options.

Chapter 6, Monitoring Your Code – Using the Workflow Monitor Screen, describes the Workflow Manager screen of PowerCenter. This screen allows you to monitor the process we execute in Workflow Manager. We will see different logfiles, statuses, and statistics on the Monitor screen.

Chapter 7, The Lifeline of Informatica – Transformations, is meant for the most important aspect of the Informatica PowerCenter tool, transformations. We will talk about the various types of transformations in this chapter. We will implement mapping using each transformation so that you get to understand each and every transformation in detail. We will end this chapter with the classifications of transformations.

Chapter 8, The Deployment Phase – Using Repository Manager, teaches you about the fourth client screen, Repository Manager. Repository Manager is basically used for migration (deployment) purposes. We will see the various options to migrate the code from one environment to other. We will also see how to create folders on the client screen.

Chapter 9, Optimization – Performance Tuning, has the contents for the optimization of the various components of the Informatica PowerCenter tool, such as sources, targets, mappings, sessions, and systems. Performance tuning at a high level involves two stages: finding issues called bottlenecks and resolving them.

Appendix, Installing Informatica and Using Informatica Administration Console, describes the detailed steps for the process of installation, starting from downloading the software, extracting the software, and installing the software, to configuring the software. We will also look at the administrator console of the PowerCenter tool and learn about the different services.

What you need for this book

Before you make your mind up about learning Informatica, it is always recommended that you have a basic understanding of SQL and Unix. Though these are not mandatory and you can easily use 90 percent of the Informatica PowerCenter tool without knowledge of these, the confidence to work in real-time SQL and Unix projects is a must-have in your kitty. People who know SQL will easily understand that ETL tools are nothing but a graphical representation of SQL. Unix is utilized in Informatica PowerCenter with the scripting aspect, which makes your life easy in some scenarios.

Who this book is for

Anybody who wishes to make a career in data warehousing or Informatica must go for this book. If you are a college graduate, an IT professional working in other technologies, or a university professor, this book is for you.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We are using HR as our user for making the connection."

A block of code is set as follows:

STEVE 1000 2000 3000 4000

JAMES 2000 2500 3000 3500

ANDY 4000 4000 4000 4000

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

IIF( ISNULL (JOB_ID), NEXTVAL, JOB_ID)

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "To open the PowerCenter Designer screen, navigate to Start | All Programs | Informatica 9.5.1 | Client | Power Center Client |Designer."

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.