Informatica PowerCenter

Informatica company provides data integration products for ETL such as data quality, data masking, data virtualization, master data management, data replica, etc. Informatica ETL is the most common Data integration tool which is used for connecting & fetching data from different data sources. Informatica PowerCenter is a powerful tool for data management with a powerful graphical user interface (GUI) that simplifies administrative tasks, ETL (extract, transform, load) design, and more. This robust platform is about more than just a user-friendly interface.

The overall architecture of Informatica PowerCenter is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The Informatica ETL tool architecture consists of following services & components:

1. Repository Service – Responsible for maintaining Informatica metadata & providing access of same to other services.
2. Integration Service – Responsible for the movement of data from sources to targets
3. Reporting Service – Enables the generation of reports
4. Nodes – Computing platform where the above services are executed
5. Informatica Designer – Used for creation of mappings between source and target
6. Workflow Manager – Used to create workflows and other task & their execution
7. Workflow Monitor – Used to monitor the execution of workflows
8. Repository Manager – Used to manage objects in repository

PowerCenter repository is a relational database like Oracle, Sybase, SQL server and it is managed by repository service. It consists of database tables that store metadata.

There are three Informatica Client tools available in Informatica PowerCenter. They are Informatica

• Designer
• Workflow Monitor
• Workflow Manager

These clients can access to the repository using repository service only.

To manage a repository there exists an Informatica service called Repository Service. A single repository service handles exclusively only one repository. Also, a repository service can execute on multiple nodes to increase the performance.

The repository services use locks on the objects, so multiple users cannot modify the same object same time.