Getting started with Informatica PowerCenterby Rajesh March 10,
2011 15 CommentsOne of the readers posted a comment as to how to
get started with the Informatica Power Center. Ive seen it asked a
lot of times and I hope to answer it here. If I have missed
anything, kindly comment below and Ill update the post as
needed.How to get StartedUnderstand SQL : I am assuming you have
some database background and familiarity with SQL, other wise it is
better to first learn SQL and queries (joins, sub queries,
constraints, primary keys..etc) before starting with ETL. Some
people argue that this is not necessary, but you just cannot go far
in your career as an ETL developer if you dont understand SQL and
(at least one) underlying RDBMS. As to what is the best one to
learn, pick whatever is the RDBMS youll be working on next (in your
company). Oracle would be my choice as I started out as an oracle
developer, but it depends on which one will be the most relevant
for your case.1. Get access to Informatica : The first (obvious)
thing to do would be to download and install Informatica. Nicolas
Gerard has some very good posts here. Install the database,
Informatica Server and Client tools.2. All the documentation for
Informatica is in the Help file. Go to any of the client tools and
Click on Help>Contents to see the entire list of User Guides for
each of them.3. For Developer Stream, these are the guides that
will be the most useful. You should probably go through them in
this order, but it is not a hard-and-fast rule. Its just the way I
would go through them if I were to start now.Getting Started Guide
: Go through each of the tutorials given (Pay close attention to
the Product Overview and the clients section) , create and run the
mappings, sessions and work-flows. Running the work-flows and
seeing the session and work-flow log will hep you get your feet wet
before you move on the architecture and advanced topics.Designer
Guide : More information on Sources, Targets, Mappings, Parameters
and Variables. The mapping wizards and type-1, type-2 dimension
tables will give you a good idea of how things are implemented and
how all of these components fit together. Youll see how
transformations are used and what they do.Transformation Guide :
Another very important guide. Transformations are what you use
day-in day-out in Informatica and you should get familiar with most
of them to be able to pick whatever is needed for your
task.Transformation Language reference : This is more of a
reference, but the functions section is something you should at
least browse through a couple of times. You dont have to remember
the syntax , but you should know the existence of functions like
DECODE, IIF, GET_DATE_PART and so on. You can always come back to
the documentation to look it up.Workflow Administration Guide :
Despite the name, this guide is one of the most important one for
developers. All the mappings that you create are logical that shows
the data flow, but you give all the connections and design the
actual ETL Processes using the work flow manager. This guide gives
you all the necessary details. Once you know how to create a
session task and a work flow, you can keep coming back to this
guide as needed later on.Performance Tuning Guide : Probably not
when you get started, but once you develop some mapings and
workflows, this is the place youl come back to, if any of the flows
take longer than expected and you need to tune them.4. Write some
Code (Develop mappings) : One you get familiarity with these, you
should try and implement as many Data Warehouse scenarios as
possible using Informatica to get really familiar with the tool.
Some of them would bei) Slowly changing dimensions (look at the
wizards for reference)ii) truncate-loadiii) one work flow waiting
on another (work flow dependencies)iv) Loading Fact and Dimension
Tablesand so on.You can come across these scenarios in your
project, on discussion boards like the IT-Toolbox, or any good ETL
and Dimensional modeling books like the ones below by Ralph Kimball
and his team .The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Complete Guide to
Dimensional Modeling (Second Edition)The Data Warehouse Lifecycle
ToolkitGo through the different stages of ETL cycle and different
kind of models and try to implement them using Informatica.For
AdministratorsI havent really worked an Informatica administrator
except as a back up , But from the little experience I have , these
are the things that you should go through to get started if you are
looking for a career on the administrative side.i) Administrator
Guideii) Installation and Configuration Guideiii) Power Connect
Guide (based on the external environment that you have)iv)
Repository Guide (all deployments to higher environments)v) Command
Line referenceIn most places I have seen, there is a common team
for both database and Informatica administration. You would be a
lot better off if you understand the underlying database concepts,
administration, installation and recovery concepts.Cheers..
