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Informatica is an ETL tool providing ETL functionality. ETL stands for Extract, Transform and Load. Its one of the most integral part of any Business Intelligence project. Informatica is popular for the simplicity and ease of use.
To learn Informatica, you don’t need any programming skills. Any non programming graduate can learn easily. It offer drag and drop features.
Informatica requires understanding on below points:
A. SQL : Any BI tool need you to have understanding on basic SQL. There is no need of advanced SQL. With basic SQL you will be better able to relate the concepts.
B. Unix : Basic commands of Unix are needed. There is no need to learn the architecture, just commands are needed.
C. Data Warehousing Concepts : Informatica is part of Data Warehousing lifecycle, hence data warehousing concepts are mandatory part of interview preperation. Concepts like OLAP, OLTP, SCD, Schema, Dimension and fact Tables etc are mandatory.
Based on these we move to Informatica.
Informatica Cloud is a latest release from Informatica which is totally in different architecture as compared to Informatica Power Centre. Informatica Cloud also offers ETL functionality, but there is no need to install anything as you do in case of Power Centre. It offers lot of advantages to business as compared to Informatica power Centre. The biggest advantage is the infrastructure costing. Since everything is managed on Informatica data centres, there is no need to set up or do any investment in infrastructure for setting up Informatica Cloud. You simply need to create an account, Informatica will provide you an URL, that’s it get started. It is that simple. Informatica Cloud also offer features like Powercenter like transformations, tasks and many other things.
The costing for organisations to use licence is also different for Informatica cloud.
From a security perspective, you only need to install a small patch on your machine to work on informatics cloud. This is called a secure agent and this makes sure there is no flow of data happening through the cloud unless you wish. You have all the right to start and stop the agent.
It’s gaining a lot of popularity these days because of the ease and costing.
Informatica cloud is also offering services like processing real time data known as ICRT, informatica cloud real time. Using this you can work on API’s, Web services and many more.
In short, as most of the organisations are moving to cloud based application, informatica cloud is making the things simple for organisations.
Informatica as its popular for is an Integration tool, which allows to fetch you data from various data sources like Excel, Oracle, Cloud application and many more. There are more than 100 connectors available in Informatica. Using the connectors you can connect to multiple external applications to fetch the data.
You can also connect to Salesforce using the connectors provided in the tool. You need the credentials of Salesforce account to connect. Details like Salesforce account URL, Username, password and Security Token is needed. You may need to contact your organisation admin team to get the details. If you are practicing individually, you can gather all these details from your salesforce account. Security Token is an extra layer of details needed to access Salesforce from any third party application.
Once you gather the details, simple use the details in the Informatica connector and connect to Salesforce.
Informatica is a product offered by Informatica Inc, its a billion dollar organisation listed in New York stock exchange and launched in 1993. Since then it’s the market leader in ETL solutions. As per Gartner survey, Informatica is still the leader in ETL solutions. Many organisations are using Informatica for their data processing. Hence it offers many jobs in Market.
ETL stands for Extract, Transform and Load. These tools help in easily processing the complex raw data and store in proper format for further processing and analytical requirements.
Using ETL Informatica you can process the data from any source system and load into any target system. Like you can fetch thousands or millions of records from Excel sheet and load in oracle. It offers any to any and many too many relationships. Means you can fetch from any source and load in any target. Also there’s no limitations on number of sources and number of targets while processing data.
ETL Informatica offers excellent transformations features also to manipulate or convert the data. Using the transformations you can clean your data before you store. There are various transformations like Filter, Aggregator, Sorter, Router, Rank, Joiner, Lookup and many advanced transformations like Sequence Generator, Update Strategy etc
Informatica also offers excellent features like joining the data sources from heterogeneous data sources, like you can join an excel sheet with a xml file. You can join an oracle table with Microsoft SQL server table. Many such features make ETL tools a mandatory in BI data processing.