Webinar: Informatica Cloud Spring 2012 Release 10am Pacific

We are excited to announce Informatica Cloud Spring 2012. All customers were upgraded on April 21st. With this release we have introduced major enhancements throughout the cloud service, such as the ability to migrate entire task flows between development and production instances of Informatica Cloud. We have also announced a new Developer Edition, is currently available in an early access program for partners. The Developer Edition will introduce the following:

• A cloud connectivity API to help you build connectors to a variety of applications rapidly and make them available through the Informatica Marketplace.
• Cloud integration templates that help you rapidly deploy commonly used integration processes between applications.

Join us for this interactive webinar to get a sneak peak at the new Developer Edition functionality and get an in-depth overview of the Spring 2012 release.

Speakers:

• Darren Cunningham, Informatica Cloud Marketing
• Ron Lunasin, Informatica Cloud Product Management

Who should attend?

• Informatica Cloud customers and prospective customers
• Informatica Cloud partners and prospective partners
• Anyone interested in the future of cloud integration

Webinar: Integrating Salesforce and SAP 10am Pacific

Are you trying to make your enterprise more social by integrating SAP and Salesforce but facing integration projects that are too complex and lengthy? Are you losing valuable time manually moving SAP data to and from Salesforce? Is inconsistent data making it impossible to track and report on vital information?

If so you'll want to be sure to attend this educational webinar. You’ll learn:

• The best practices and techniques to integrate Salesforce and SAP
• A proven and flexible approach to migrating and synchronizing data between both systems
• How quickly and effectively Informatica Cloud can integrate your Salesforce and SAP data

About Informatica Cloud:
Informatica Cloud delivers data integration as a service solutions and has been recognized four years in a row as the #1 application for Salesforce.com customers on the AppExchange.

Informatica Adds Developer Edition to Cloud Data-integration Platform

Informatica has added a new developer edition to its cloud-based data-integration platform in a bid to further expand a partner ecosystem around the service, the company announced Monday.

Now available through an early-access program, Informatica Cloud Developer Edition provides systems integrators and software vendors with a Java-based programming interface for creating connectors to various cloud services.
The connectors can have "complete native connectivity" to data objects within an application and can also be easily packaged for sale through Informatica's marketplace, according to the company's website.
Also featured in the developer edition are Cloud Integration Templates, a library of pre-built workflows for common data-integration scenarios. The basic templates can be tweaked as desired, according to Informatica. A REST (representational state transfer) API can be used to embed the templates natively into a cloud application.
Developer Edition was announced in conjunction with the general availability of Informatica Cloud's Spring 2012 edition.
The release include easier ways to move cloud integration objects back and forth from development and product environments, as well as Informatica Cloud instances. The update also adds support for using version 24 of Salesforce.com's Web Services API (application programming interface), Informatica said.
Cloud data-integration technology is becoming more and more important as customers adopt on-demand services and wish to tie them back to on-premises systems, as well as to other cloud software.
Informatica Cloud competes with rivals such as IBM's Cast Iron offering and Dell's Boomi platform, as well as open-source offerings such as Talend.
Pricing starts at US$1,000 per month for Informatica Cloud Professional Edition, with Basic, Standard and Enterprise versions available at higher cost. The company also offers a number of Express editions with more limited feature sets.

Some Thoughts about Data Proximity for Big Data Calculations – Part 2

Treating Big Data Performance Woes with the Data Replication Cure Blog Series – Part 2
In my last posting, I suggested that the primary bottleneck for performance computing of any type, including big data applications, is the latency associated with getting data from where it is to where it needs to be. If the presumptive big data analytics platform/programming model is Hadoop, (which is also often presumed to provide in-memory analytics), though, there are three key issues:
1)     Getting the massive amounts of data into the Hadoop file system and memory from where those data sets originate,
2)     Getting results out of the Hadoop system to where the results need to be, and
3)     Moving data around within the Hadoop application.
That third item could use a little further investigation. Hadoop is built as an open source implementation of Google’s Map Reduce, a model in which computation is allocated across multiple processing units in a two-phased manner. During the first phase, “Map,” each processing node is allocated a chunk of the data for analysis; the interim results are cached locally within each processing node. For example, if the task were to count the number of occurrences of company names in a collection of social network streams, then a bucket for each company would be created at each node to hold the count of occurrences accumulated from each stream subset.
During the second phase, “Reduce,” the interim results at each node are then combined across the network. If there were very few buckets altogether, this would not be a big deal. However, if there are many, many buckets (which we might presume due to the “bigness” of the data), the reduce phase might incur a significant amount of communication – yet another example of a potential bottleneck.
This theme is not limited to Hadoop applications. Even just looking at analytical appliances used for traditional business intelligence queries, there is a general thought out there that because data resides within the environment in a way that is supposed to meet the demands of mixed workload processing, that the operational data is generally going to be in the same locations where the analytical engine is.  And if you consider those commonplace queries that are used for regularly-generated reports, this knowledge aforethought can be put to good use in a data distribution scheme.
However, not all queries are the same old canned queries over and over again, and in many more sophisticated cases, ad hoc queries with multiple join conditions are going to require that those attributes used for the join conditions be moved from their original allocation to be communicated to all the nodes computing the join!  In essence, my opinion is that the idea that the data is where it needs to be is fundamentally flawed, since there is no way that the mixed workload can use the same data resources in their original places except in extremely controlled circumstances in which all the queries are known ahead of time.
So unless we have some additional set of strategies, we are going to still be at the mercy of the network. And as the volumes of data grow so will the bottlenecks… More next week. I will discuss this topic more on May 23 for the Information-Management.com EspressoShot webinar, Treating Big Data Performance Woes with the Data Replication Cure.

Do You Know Where Your Existing Database Security Solutions Are Failing?

Recently, Oracle announced that its latest April critical patch update does not address the TNS Poison vulnerability uncovered by a researcher 4 years ago. In addition to this vulnerability from an attacker, organizations face data breaches from internal negligence and insiders. In a May 2012 survey by the Ponemon Institute, 50% say sensitive data contained in databases and applications has been compromised or stolen by malicious insiders such as privileged users. On top of that 68% find it difficult to restrict user access to sensitive information in IT and business environments.
While databases offer basic security features that can be programmed and configured to protect data, it may not be enough and may not scale with your growing organizations. The problem stems from the fact that application development and DBA teams need to have a solid understanding of database vendor specific offerings in order to ensure that the security feature has been properly set up and deployed. If your organization has a number of different databases (Oracle, DB2, Microsoft SQL Server) and that number is growing, it can be costly to maintain all the database specific solutions. Many Informatica customers have faced this problem and looked to Informatica to provide a complete, end-to-end solution that addresses database security on an enterprise-wide level.
Come talk to us at Informatica World and hear from our customers about how they’ve used Informatica to minimize the risk of breaches across a number of use cases including:
- Test data management
- Production support in off-shore projects
- Dynamically protecting PII or PHI data for research portals
- Dynamically protecting data in cross-border applications
At Informatica, you can meet us in our sessions:
10:10 – 11:10 – Ensuring Data Privacy for Warehouses and Applications with Informatica Data Masking in Room Juniper 3
11:20 – 12:20 – Protecting Sensitive Data Using Informatica’s Test Data Management Solution in Room Starvine 12
Also come to the Informatica Data Privacy booth and lab for in depth demonstrations and presentations of our data privacy solutions and customer deployments.

informatica

 Informatica is a widely used ETL tool for extracting the source data and loading it into the target after applying the required transformation. In the following section, we will try to explain the usage of Informatica in the Data Warehouse environment with an example. Here we are not going into the details of data warehouse design and this tutorial simply provides the overview about how INFORMATICA can be used as an ETL tool

Note: The exchanges/companies that are explained here is for illustrative purpose only.
Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and National Stock Exchange (NSE) are two major stock exchanges in India in which the shares of ABC Corporation and XYZ Private Limited are traded between Mondays through Friday except Holidays.  Assume that a software company “KLXY Limited” has taken the project to integrate the data between two exchanges BSE and NSE.

In order to complete this task of integrating the Raw data received  from NSE & BSE, KLXY Limited allots responsibilities to Data  Modelers, DBAs and ETL Developers. During this entire ETL process,  many IT professionals may involve, but we are highlighting the  roles of these three personals only for easy understanding and  better clarity.

Data Modelers analyze the data from these two sources(Record  Layout 1 & Record Layout 2), design Data Models, and then generate  scripts to create necessary tables and the corresponding records.

DBAs create the databases and tables based on the scripts  generated by the data modelers.

ETL developers map the extracted data from source systems and  load it to target systems after applying the required  transformations.

 The complete process of data transformation from external sources to our target data warehouse is explained using the following sections. Each section will be explained in detail.

Data from the external sources (source1 - .CSV (comma seperated) file , source2 - Oracle table)</li>

Source(s) table layout details</li>

Look up table details</li>

Target table layout details

Defining Source table and target table in Informatica

Implementing extraction mapping in Informatica (Mapping Designer)

Implementing transformation and loading mapping in Informatica

Workflow creation in Informatica (Workflow Manager)

Verifying records through Informatica (Workflow Monitor)

 

The (7) essentials of Informatica Repository

Here are few handy tips that will help you to understand informatica repository.For those who have limited Informatica experience but starting on tool to write etl code. Also, stated some helpful metadata views.

#1. Repository is a generic term referred to container, place or room where something is stored.

#2. Informatica repository is a set of database tables where informatica stores its metadata. METADATA is data that describes other data.More specifically it is data about data.

#3. Informatica repository keeps Informatica Meta data.Information about different type of objects, Example mappings, transformations, Folders, connections, user privileges etc.

#4. Informatica repository metadata tables in industry also called as OPB tables/views or REP tables/views.

#5. Repository is managed with client tool “informatica power center repository manager”. Repository manager is useful for ADMIN activities.

1      You can create, edit and delete folders.

2      You can manage object and user permissions.

3      You can backup repository to local machine and restore it back to some other server.

4      You can create deployment group.

5      You can view objects and their locks as well you can disable write intent lock on the objects locked by you.

6      You can import and export objects.

7      You can copy objects from one folder to another.

Important informatica repository views

Here is run-down of some useful repository views. Repository views helps to perform analysis in applications where you are on code maintenance/ enhancement role. With no assumptions, impact analysis can be achieved.

#6. REP_WFLOW_RUN

It helps to have easy consolidated workflow run statistics. You can capture run statistics of all the WFs for a day. Pick failed and aborted workflows. Recover high  priority  workflows first and rest later.

#7. REP_ALL_TRANSFORMS,REP_WIDGET_ATTR

Join of these tables gives all the lookup in a folder. it also tells that which DB tables those lookup are poiting to. you can use it to understand which is the most important lookup table  in a folder/Project. Also, how many lookup need to change, if your lookup table is changing.

prevnext Informatica PowerCenter Level I Developer

This four-day, instructor-led course provides the basic skills and knowledge developers new to Informatica PowerCenter require to implement data integration projects, exposing core features of PowerCenter through lecture and hands-on exercises. In addition to gaining tremendous insight into the data integration platform, you will be exposed to Informatica Velocity Best Practices, troubleshooting techniques, and the use of technical support options. The course concludes with workshops in which you will design and implement a data integration project based on business requirements and a discussion of new features in PowerCenter 9.

PowerCenter 8.x/9.0 Level I Developer Content Details

Power Center: Terminology and Architecture

• Explain the purpose of PowerCenter
• Define terms used in PowerCenter
• Name the major components of PowerCenter

Mapping Fundamentals

• Create source and target definitions from flat files and relational tables
• Create a mapping using existing source and target definitions
• Use links to connect ports

Workflow Fundamentals

• Create a basic workflow and link its tasks
• Run a workflow, monitor its execution, and verify the results

Expression and Filter Transformations

• Use expression xformations to perform calculations on a row-by-row basis
• Use filter xformations to drop rows based on user-defined conditions

Joining and Merging Data

• Use Source Qualifier xformation to implement homogeneous joins
• Use Join xformation to implement heterogeneous joins
• Use Union xformation to merge records into a single record set

Lookup Transformation

• Use lookup xformations to bring in additional data related to a row

Aggregator and Sorter Transformations

• Order a set of records based on one or more fields using the Sorter xformation
• Calculate values based on data in a set of records using the Aggregator xformation

Using the debugger

• Use the Debug wizard and toolbar to debug a mapping

Updating Target Tables

• Use a router xformation to divide a single set of records into multiple sets of records
• Use an update strategy xformation to determine how the target should handle records (insert/update/delete)

Mapping Techniques

• Set and use variables and parameters

Create and use reusable transformations

• Use an unconnected lookup to provide values on an as-needed basis

Mapplets

• Create mapplets and incorporate them into mappings

Controlling Workflows

• Set and use workflow variables
• Use link conditions and decision tasks to control the execution of a workflow
• Use other workflow tasks
• Explain the purpose of the pmcmd utility
• Correctly use bulk and normal loading
• Schedule workflows to run automatically

Mapping Design Workshop

• Follow best practices for mapping design
• Create a mapping based on defined business needs

Workflow Design Workshop

• Follow best practices for workflow design
• Create a workflow based on defined business needs

Informatica Architecture

Informatica Architecture is divided into two components:
1. Server Components --> Server Components in Informatica are:
a. Repository Server
b. Informatica Server
2. Client Components --> Client Components in Informatica are:
a. Workflow Designer
b. Workflow Manager
c. Workflow Monitor
d. Repository Manager
Here is the Architecture Flow Diagram of Informatica:
Now, let`s talk about the flow in detail:
A developer writes a program in the Designer. The program is a GUI-Based program and is called Mapping. Once the mapping is created, the mapping needs to be saved into the repository.
Once the program(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.
In the next tutorial, we are going to define the Informatica Client Tools.

Informatica 8.1 Architecture Diagram