Informatica Software Architecture

Informatica ETL product, known as Informatica Power Center consists of 3 main components.

1. Informatica PowerCenter Client Tools
2. Informatica PowerCenter Repository
3. Informatica PowerCenter Server

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)

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 / hard disk, which has got the ability to process data but has no data to process. This can be treated as backend of Informatica.

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.

Now, let`s talk about the flow in detail:

An ETL developer design GUI-Based program and is called Mapping to extract, transform and load the data. Once the mapping is created, the mapping needs to be saved into the repository.

Once the mapping is saved, the next step is to execute the program. To execute the program WorkFlow Manager tool is required. You cannot execute the mapping directly, you need to create a session task for the mapping. Once the session task is created it needs to be saved into the repository.

Also, you cannot execute the session task directly. For execution you need to create a Workflow using the Workflow Manager tool. Once created you need to save the workflow to the repository. Workflow will be executed from the workflow manager.

During the execution of the workflow, you can monitor the activities using the WorkFlow Monitor.