What is Informatica and why Should use??

If you want to set up a Data Warehouse - then you will love to have Informatica software. It will greatly simplify DW design, and numerous routine tasks related to data transformation and migration (ETL - Extract, Transform, and Load), day-to-day maintenance and management.

• www.informatica.com

Informatica has a simple visual interface. You do most of the work by simply dragging and dropping with your mouse in the Designer. This graphical approach makes it also very easy to understand what is going on (it is "self-documenting" in a sense).

Informatica can communicate with all major databases, can move/transform data between them. It can move huge volumes of data in a very effective way. It can throttle the transactions (do big updates in small chunks to avoid long locking and filling the transactional log). It can effectively do joins between tables in different databases on different servers. The tasks are performed by Informatica Server (Unix or MS Windows). You get a client application called "Server Manager" to work with the server.

You design your processes in a client application called "Designer". This is where you you tell what the source databases and tables will be, what will be the targets, and how you move/transform the data.

Informatica uses its own database called "Metadata Repository Database", or simply a Repository. Repository stores the data (rules) needed for data extraction, transformation, loading, and management. You get a client application "Repository Manager" to work with the repository.

Informatica comes in different packages:

• Informatica PowerCenter license - has all options, including distributed metadata, ability to organize repositories into a data mart domain and share metadata accross repositories.
• PowerMart  PowerMart - a limited license (all features except distributed metadata and multiple registered servers)

Other products by Informatica:

• Informatica PowerAnalyzer (web based tool for data analysis - Business Intelligence)
• Informatica SuperGlue - managing metadata (data about data). Directory of data (personalized), graphical representation of data quality and flow, flexible analysis and reporting (based on PowerAnalyzer) of overall data volumes, loading performance, etc.
• Informatica PowerExchange is a family of data access products that enables your IT organization to access all sources of enterprise data without having to develop custom data access programs.
  By being able to access mission-critical operational data wherever it may be stored and deliver it wherever and whenever it’s needed, your IT organization can maximize its limited resources and the business value of its data.

PowerExchange also helps you access, load, and deliver data as part of the Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) process to simplify the development and deployment of smaller departmental data marts and data warehouses as an incremental approach toward enterprise data warehousing.