What is Informatica and why it is used?

Informatica has several products focused on data integration. However, Informatica PowerCenter is the flagship product in the portfolio. It has become so popular that Informatica PowerCenter has now become synonymous to Informatica. So whenever I use Informatica in the blog now, it essentially means Informatica PowerCenter. Informatica is a data integration tool based on ETL architecture. It provides data integration software and services for various businesses, industries and government organizations including telecommunication, health care, financial and insurance services.

What is the context in which Data Integration is used?

Every company nowadays processes a huge set of data. They come from varied sources and needs to be processed to give insightful information for making business decisions. But quite often such data has following challenges:

• Large companies with lots of data: Such huge chunk of data can be in any format. They would be available in multiple databases and many unstructured files.
• This data must be collated, combined, compared, and made to work as a seamless whole. But the different databases don’t communicate well!
• Many organizations have implemented interfaces between these databases:
• Every pair of databases requires a unique interface
• If you change one database, many interfaces may have to be upgraded

But there are different architecture in data integration technology. Informatica uses the Extract, Transform & Load (ETL) architecture which is the most popular architecture to perform data integration. So it is imperative that we understand What is ETL and how Informatica performs ETL to solve such business problems.

What is ETL?

ETL is a type of data integration and involves an architecture that extracts, transforms, and then loads data in the target database or file. It is the foundation of data warehouse.

An ETL system does the following:

• Extracts data from source systems
• Transforms and cleans up the data
• Indexes data
• Summarizes data
• Loads data into the warehouse
• Tracks changes made to the source data required for the warehouse
• Restructures keys
• Maintains the metadata
• Refreshes the warehouse with updated data

What is the use of Informatica ETL tool?:

Informatica PowerCenter is a premium data integration solution available today. The reason it provides the best solution in large enterprises is because it is: 

• database neutral and hence can communicate with any database
• the most powerful data transformations tool. It converts one application’s data to another’s format

Moving on in this article on what is Informatica, let us understand how does Informatica perform ETL.

How Informatica performs ETL:

 ETL: Extract

• PowerCenter reads data, row by row, from a table (or group of related tables) in a database, or from a file
• This database or file is referred to as the source
• The structure of the source is contained in a source definition object.