Informatica ETL Power Center 8

Extract, Transform and Load

The Informatica ETL product is called PowerCenter. It was one of the earliest ETL tools on the market and uses a user-friendly GUI designer interface to build jobs that run on one or more transformation servers. In PowerCenter 8 the product has pushdown optimization that executes transformation steps on a database server. This gives the an ETLT capability - extract, transform, load and transform.
PowerCenter 8 comes with options for expanding the capabilities of the ETL tool, these are a selection that impact how ETL jobs execute:
Partitioning Option: for partitioning data to process it in parallel across multiple CPUs or servers.
Real Time Option: for turning PowerCenter jobs into real time services.
Enterprise Grid Option: for automating the deployment and load balancing of PowerCenter jobs on a grid

Metadata Management

Informatica has some technical metadata functions and reports in the PowerCenter product to support ETL development. In addition Informatica has the Metadata Manager and the Metadata Exchange Option.
In 2003 Informatica launched the SuperGlue metadata management solution for additional metadata capabilities. It is a web based solution for assembling, visualizing and analyzing metadata from various enterprise systems. In 2005 Informatica launched PowerCenter Advanced Edition that came bundled with SuperGlue. With the release of PowerCenter 8 Advanced Edition the SuperGlue name is gone and the product is now known as Metadata Manager and is only available in this product bundle.
Informatica offers a PowerCenter option called Metadata Exchange that uses a wizard driven interface to import source definitions into PowerCenter. It provides more descriptive metadata and some metadata synchronization functions for when source metadata definitions change. It offers a combination of bi-directional and uni-directional exchange of metadata to products such as ERwin, Oracle Designer, Cognos Impromptu and Business Objects Designer.

Data Quality

In January of 2006 Informatica acquired Similarity Systems to considerably enhance its data quality and data profile functionality. The Similarity ATHANOR product has been renamed to Informatica Data Quality. It offers data cleansing, data matching and data quality reporting and monitoring. nformatica Data Quality processes can be added to a PowerCenter job within the PowerCenter Mapping Designer by selecting a data quality building block.
Informatica relies on additional third party vendors to deliver address validation capabilities to Data Quality. These products are licensed separately through Informatica.
There is also PowerCenter Data Cleanse and Match option that was built by Informatica prior to the Similarity acquisition. It offers data cleansing and parsing and data matching and is fully integrated with PowerCenter to seemlessly use the Data Partitioning and Enterprise Grid capabilities for scalable processing.

Data Profiling

In 2005 Similarity Systems acquired Evoke software to add the Evoke Axio profiling tool to the data quality suite and gain access to a wider customer base in the US and Asia. Similarity was in turn acquired by Informatica in January of 2006. Informatica renamed Evoke Axio to Information Data Explorer and offers it as a stand alone product or as a companion to PowerCenter.
Data Explorer provides data profiling functions to discover and define the content, structure and quality of data. It provides data mapping capabilities for source to target mapping that can be accessed from within PowerCenter.
PowerCenter also has a Mapping Generation Option that uses the free Informatica Data Stencil design tool for Microsoft Visio that generates PowerCenter mappings from Visio designs or reverse engineers a PowerCenter mapping into a Visio mapping template.