Informatica PowerCenter Training - IDESTRAININGS

There are many tools available in the market. But we choose Informatica because Informatica is easy, powerful and capable to do all ETL operations with effective results. The Informatica PowerCenter client application consists of four different tools to manage the repository and design the mappings.

PowerCenter designer:

In Informatica PowerCenter, when the designer tool is opened, one can find a navigation bar with the repository that contains a list of repositories on the left side. And on the right side, it consists of the work area or the workspace. Now connect to one of the repositories and right click on any of the folders. When any one of the folder is opened, the work area is visible. 

Mapping designer:

In Informatica PowerCenter, one can import the sources, create the targets, create the transformations, build the logic based on the business requirements and create the overflow which is called as mapping. In mapping, one can find five different sub tools under the tools menu. They are source analyzer, target designer, transformation developer, mapplet designer, mapping designer.

Target designer: In this, it has a menu and the menu keeps changing when someone clicks on it. If one clicks on source then the source menu is displayed and if one clicks on target then the target menu is displayed. Under the target, there are import wizards. If one doesn’t need the above then click on create and use the list. If there is something which is not in the list and not in the create option, then one has to use some other tool which is pre-step to ETL to convert that into one of the formats which Informatica can read and then use that as a resource or a target.

Transformation developer: In this, one can develop transformations to use in mapping. It’s not mandatory that one should create the transformations there. They can directly import any of the transformations into the mapping directly in PowerCenter. The only reason to choose transformation developer is, whenever one want to create a reusable transformation that they want to use in more than one mapping or they want to develop a user-defined function. Else, they can always use it in the maplet or the mapping.

Mapplet designer: There are some rules or conditions for the mapplet designer on what transformations to use. For example, one cannot use XML transformation when some other transformation is present. The overall purpose of the mapplet designer is to create a group of transformations which one can make them as reasonable and use them in any number of mappings that are required. In other words, it is used to create a group of transformations which are required and make them reusable. For example, if one considers the employee table, let’s assume that one wants to remove the white noise before and after the attributes like removing the space before and after. So all they need to do is to create a reusable object which will always check if there is any space and trim them if required. Thus one can use that trimming methodology in any mapping wherever that employee table is used as the source. are doing it. 

Mapping designer: It is the final one where you consolidate all the other four, based on the requirement. By default, for a mapping to be valid you need to have a source and a target in at least one transformation. There is no limitation on how many transformations you are using within the mapping in PowerCenter. It’s all the logic in the business requirement. Based on the requirement, you can set as many number of transformations, maplets whichever are required within your mapping.

Workflow manager:

Within the workflow manager, you will have three different sub tools. They are task developer, work let designer and workflow designer. Under the task developer, one can create tasks which are reusable. That means one can create it once and use it for n number of times whenever required. If you have to use a task or any of the components in session command, then in the email you would create them at a task developer. If you don’t want to use then you can create them separately as a standalone option under the workflow designer. Under the work let designer, you create the work let which is again a set of tasks. Just like the maplet you can create four different tasks and can combine all of them together in the workflow designer.

Repository manager:

This is the area where the majority of the administrative tasks were done earlier. Now, most of these are moved to administrative console and is specifically used only for deployments, changing passwords, creating the folders, etc., and there are users for it. But we don’t log in to this tool on a daily basis and in some of the projects, there will be access restrictions to this tool.