PowerCenter 8

Level I Developer
Education Services

Version PC8LID-20060428

Informatica Corporation, 2006. All rights reserved.

Course Objectives
Enable you to use PowerCenter developer tools to:
Create and debug mappings
Create, run, monitor and troubleshoot workflows

Provide experience in designing mappings and

workflows

Unit 1. Data Integration Concepts

Unit 1

Unit Objectives
Introduce Informatica
Understand data integration concepts

Unit 1

Informatica The Data Integration

Company
Informatica provides data integration tools for both
batch and real-time applications:
Data Migration

Data Warehousing

Data
Synchronization

Business Activity
Monitoring

Data Hubs

Unit 1

Informatica Company Information

Founded in 1993

Leader in enterprise solution products

Headquarters in Redwood City, CA

Public company since April 1999 (INFA)

2000+ customers, including over 80% of Fortune 100

Strategic partnerships with IBM Global Services, HP, Accenture, SAP, and
many others

Technology partnership with Composite Software for Enterprise Information

Integration (EII) real-time federated views and reporting across multiple
data sources

Worldwide distribution

Unit 1

Informatica Affiliations

Unit 1

Informatica Resources
www.informatica.com provides information (under Services) on:
Professional Services
Education Services
my.informatica.com customers and contractual partners can sign up
to access:
Technical Support
Product documentation (under Tools online documentation)
Velocity Methodology (under Services)
Knowledgebase
Mapping templates
devnet.informatica.com sign up for Informatica Developers Network
Discussion forums
Web seminars
Technical papers
Unit 1

Extract, Transform and Load Example

Decision Support

Operational Systems
RDBMS

Mainframe

Data

Other

Transaction data
Optimized for transaction
response time
Current
Normalized or
De-normalized data

Extract

Warehouse

Aggregate data
Cleanse data
Consolidate data
Apply business rules
De-normalize data

Aggregated data
Historical data

Transform
ETL
Unit 1

Load
9

Assembly Line Analogy

Assembly Line

ETL

Product design

Target data model

High-level instructions

Mapping

Detailed instructions

Transformations

Operational assembly line

Workflow

Operational steps

Task

Documented procedures

Metadata

Unit 1

10

Mapping
Logically Defines the ETL Process:
Reads data from sources
Applies transformation logic to data
Writes transformed data to targets

Source

Transformations

Target

Note: Sources and targets can be flat files, relational tables, XML files,
application systems, message queues, etc

Unit 1

11

Transformations

Generate, modify, or pass data

Data passes into and out of

transformations through ports that
you link in a mapping

Passive transformations do not

change the number of rows received

Active transformations can change

the number of rows received

Unit 1

12

PowerCenter Transformations (partial list)

Source Qualifier: reads data from flat file and relational sources
Expression: performs row-level calculations
Filter: drops rows conditionally
Sorter: sorts data
Aggregator: performs aggregate calculations
Joiner: joins heterogeneous sources
Lookup: looks up values and passes them to other objects
Update Strategy: tags rows for insert, update, delete, reject
Router: routes rows conditionally
Transaction Control: allows data-driven commits and rollbacks

Unit 1

13

Advanced PowerCenter Transformations

Union: Performs a union-all join between two data streams
Java: allows Java syntax to be used within PowerCenter
Midstream XML Parser: reads XML from anywhere in mapping
Midstream XML Generator: writes XML to anywhere

More Source Qualifiers: read from XML, message queues

and applications

Unit 1

14

Task
An executable set of actions, functions or
commands
Examples:
Session task runs a mapping
Command task runs a shell script
Email task sends an email
Decision task branches workflow conditionally
Timer task waits for a specified period

Unit 1

15

Workflow
A collection of ordered tasks
Tasks can be linked sequentially, concurrently and/or combined
Links can be conditional on previous tasks completing

Unit 1

16

Metadata
Defines data and processes
Examples:
Source and target definitions
Type (flat file, database table, XML file, etc)
Datatype (character string, integer, decimal, etc)
Other attributes (length, precision, etc.)

Mapping logic
Workflow logic

Stored in a metadata repository

Unit 1

Repository

17

Unit 1 Quiz
Match the terms and explanations:
1.

ETL

2.

Mapping

3.

a.

An executable set of actions,

functions or commands

Workflow

b.

Defines data and processes

4.

Metadata

c.

Generates or manipulates data

5.

Transformation

d.

Logically defines the ETL process

6.

Task

e.

A collection of ordered tasks

f.

Extract, transform and load data

Unit 1

18