What is Informatica and it?s Architecture
The Informatica is known to be the most trusted and widely popular brand for data integration tools, offering varied range of products to the customers. The famous products of Informatica offers to the customers are the Power Center and the Ultra messaging software. Informatica, on a large scale offers several job opportunities for new comers looking for their career in the field of technology.
Features of Informatica:
1. Informatica is software which allows the user to create a data warehouse with ease. It makes the process of designing, ETL and maintaining the data warehouse a breeze as well.
2. Informatica has a simple visual interface. You do most of the work by simply dragging and dropping with your mouse in the Designer. This graphical approach makes it also very easy to understand what is going on.
3. Informatica can communicate with all major databases, can move/transform data between them. It can move huge volumes of data in a very effective way. It can throttle the transactions
4. It can effectively do joins between tables in different databases on different servers. The tasks are performed by Informatica Server You get a client application called “Server Manager” to work with the server.
5. Informatica uses its own database called “Metadata Repository Database”, or simply a Repository. Repository stores the data (rules) needed for data extraction, transformation, loading, and management. You get a client application “Repository Manager” to work with the repository.
6. Bringing a new phase to the market of technology, Informatica has even opened several doors at the career front for many aspiring candidates wanting to build their career in technology field. Career in Informatica is the dream goal of many.
Thus Informatica Company incorporated various training classes as well for the public to understand the benefits and advantages of the software.
Informatica Software Architecture:
Informatica ETL product, known as Informatica Power Center consists of 3 main components.
1. Informatica PowerCenter Client Tools:
These are the development tools installed at developer end. These tools enable a developer to
* Define transformation process, known as mapping. (Designer)
* Define run-time properties for a mapping, known as sessions (Workflow Manager)
* Monitor execution of sessions (Workflow Monitor)
* Manage repository, useful for administrators (Repository Manager)
* Report Metadata (Metadata Reporter)
2. Informatica PowerCenter Repository:
Repository is the heart of Informatica tools. Repository is a kind of data inventory where all the data related to mappings, sources, targets etc is kept. This is the place where all the metadata for your application is stored. All the client tools and Informatica Server fetch data from Repository. Informatica client and server without repository is same as a PC without memory/hard disk, which has got the ability to process data but has no data to process. This can be treated as backend of Informatica.
3. Informatica PowerCenter Server:
Server is the place, where all the executions take place. Server makes physical connections to sources/targets, fetches data, applies the transformations mentioned in the mapping and loads the data in the target system.