Informatica Corporation (Informatica), a multi-million dollar company established on February 1993, is an independent provider of enterprise data integration and data quality software and services. Informatica PowerCenter is the most widely used tool of Informatica across the globe for various data integration processes. Informatica PowerCenter tool helps integration of data from almost any business system in almost any format. This flexibility of PowerCenter to handle almost any data makes it most widely tool in the data integration world.

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)

Key features

• Learn the functionalities of each component in the Informatica PowerCenter tool and deploy them to accomplish executive reporting using logical data stores
• Learn the core features of Informatica PowerCenter tool along with its administration and architectural aspects
• Develop skills to extract data and efficiently utilize it with the help of world’s most widely used integration tool, and make a promising career in Informatica PowerCenter

Difference in approach

The simple thought behind this book is to put all the essential ingredients of Informatica, starting from basic things, such as downloads, extraction, and installation to working on client tools and high-level aspects, such as scheduling, migration, and so on. There are multiple blogs available across the Internet that talk about the Informatica tool but none presents end-to-end answers. We have tried to put up all the steps and processes in a systematic manner to help you easily start with the learning. In this book, you will get a step-by-step procedure for every aspect of the Informatica PowerCenter tool.

While writing this book, the author has kept in mind the importance of live, practical exposure of the graphical interface of the tool to the audience and hence, you will notice a lot of screenshots illustrating the steps to help you understand and follow the process. The chapters area arranged in such a way that all the aspects of the Informatica PowerCenter tool are covered, and they are in a proper flow in order to achieve the functionality. Here is a gist regarding the significant aspects of the book:

• Installation of Informatica and the information regarding the administrator console of the PowerCenter tool
• The basic and advanced topics of the Designer Screen.
• Implementation of the different types of Slowly Changing Dimension
• Understanding of the Workflow Manager
• Monitoring the code
• Implementation of mapping using different types of transformations
• Classification of transformations
• Usage of Repository Manager

Required skills

Before you make your mind up about learning Informatica, it is always recommended that you have a basic understanding of SQL and Unix. Though these are not mandatory and you can easily use 90 percent of the Informatica PowerCenter tool without knowledge of these, the confidence to work in real-time SQL and Unix projects is a must-have in your kitty. People who know SQL will easily understand that ETL tools are nothing but a graphical representation of SQL. Unix is utilized in Informatica PowerCenter with the scripting aspect, which makes your life easy in some scenarios.

Summary

Informatica PowerCenter has emerged as one of the most useful ETLs employed to build enterprise data warehouses. The PowerCenter tool can make your life easy and can offer you some great career path if learnt properly. This book will thereby help you get a know-how of PowerCenter.

Resources for Article:

Further resources on this subject:

• Transition to Readshift [article]
• Cloudera Hadoop and HP Vertica [article]
• Learning to Fly with Force.com [article]