INFORMATICA ARCHITECTURE

Informatica Software Architecture illustrated

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/harddisk, 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.

Sources:

Standard: RDBMS, Flat Files, XML, ODBC
Applications: SAP R/3, SAP BW, PeopleSoft, Siebel, JD Edwards, i2
EAI: MQ Series, Tibco, JMS, Web Services
Legacy: Mainframes (DB2, VSAM, IMS, IDMS, Adabas)AS400 (DB2, Flat File)

Targets:

Standard: RDBMS, Flat Files, XML, ODBC
Applications: SAP R/3, SAP BW, PeopleSoft, Siebel, JD Edwards, i2
EAI: MQ Series, Tibco, JMS, Web Services
Legacy: Mainframes (DB2)AS400 (DB2)

The pictorial description will look like this...





INFORMATICA PRODUCT LINE:

Informatica Product Line

Informatica is a powerful ETL tool from Informatica Corporation, a leading provider of enterprise data integration software and ETL softwares.

The important products provided by Informatica Corporation is provided below:

Power Center
Power Mart
Power Exchange
Power Center Connect
Power Channel
Metadata Exchange
Power Analyzer
Super Glue

Power Center & Power Mart: Power Mart is a departmental version of Informatica for building, deploying, and managing data warehouses and data marts. Power center is used for corporate enterprise data warehouse and power mart is used for departmental data warehouses like data marts. Power Center supports global repositories and networked repositories and it can be connected to several sources. Power Mart supports single repository and it can be connected to fewer sources when compared to Power Center. Power Mart can extensibily grow to an enterprise implementation and it is easy for developer productivity through a codeless environment.

Power Exchange: Informatica Power Exchange as a stand alone service or along with Power Center, helps organizations leverage data by avoiding manual coding of data extraction programs. Power Exchange supports batch, real time and changed data capture options in main frame(DB2, VSAM, IMS etc.,), mid range (AS400 DB2 etc.,), and for relational databases (oracle, sql server, db2 etc) and flat files in unix, linux and windows systems.

Power Center Connect: This is add on to Informatica Power Center. It helps to extract data and metadata from ERP systems like IBM's MQSeries, Peoplesoft, SAP, Siebel etc. and other third party applications.

Power Channel: This helps to transfer large amount of encrypted and compressed data over LAN, WAN, through Firewalls, tranfer files over FTP, etc.

Meta Data Exchange: Metadata Exchange enables organizations to take advantage of the time and effort already invested in defining data structures within their IT environment when used with Power Center. For example, an organization may be using data modeling tools, such as Erwin, Embarcadero, Oracle designer, Sybase Power Designer etc for developing data models. Functional and technical team should have spent much time and effort in creating the data model's data structures(tables, columns, data types, procedures, functions, triggers etc). By using meta deta exchange, these data structures can be imported into power center to identifiy source and target mappings which leverages time and effort. There is no need for informatica developer to create these data structures once again.

Power Analyzer: Power Analyzer provides organizations with reporting facilities. PowerAnalyzer makes accessing, analyzing, and sharing enterprise data simple and easily available to decision makers. PowerAnalyzer enables to gain insight into business processes and develop business intelligence.

With PowerAnalyzer, an organization can extract, filter, format, and analyze corporate information from data stored in a data warehouse, data mart, operational data store, or otherdata storage models. PowerAnalyzer is best with a dimensional data warehouse in a relational database. It can also run reports on data in any table in a relational database that do not conform to the dimensional model.

Super Glue: Superglue is used for loading metadata in a centralized place from several sources. Reports can be run against this superglue to analyze meta data.