Getting started with Informatica PowerCenter

by Rajesh
March 10, 2011 15 Comments

One of the readers posted a comment as to how to get started with the Informatic
a Power Center. I ve seen it asked a lot of times and I hope to answer it here. If
I have missed anything, kindly comment below and I ll update the post as needed.
How to get Started
Understand 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 qu
eries, constraints, primary keys..etc) before starting with ETL. Some people arg
ue that this is not necessary, but you just cannot go far in your career as an E
TL developer if you don t understand SQL and (at least one) underlying RDBMS. As t
o what is the best one to learn, pick whatever is the RDBMS you ll be working on n
ext (in your company). Oracle would be my choice as I started out as an oracle d
eveloper, 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 downl
oad and install Informatica. Nicolas Gerard has some very good posts here. Insta
ll the database, Informatica Server and Client tools.
2. All the documentation for Informatica is in the Help file. Go to any of the c
lient tools and Click on Help>Contents to see the entire list of User Guides for e
ach 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 rul
e. It s 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 attent
ion to the Product Overview and the clients section) , create and run the mappin
gs, sessions and work-flows. Running the work-flows and seeing the session and w
ork-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 t
ogether. You ll see how transformations are used and what they do.
Transformation Guide : Another very important guide. Transformations are what yo
u use day-in day-out in Informatica and you should get familiar with most of the
m to be able to pick whatever is needed for your task.
Transformation Language reference : This is more of a reference, but the functio
ns section is something you should at least browse through a couple of times. Yo
u don t have to remember the syntax , but you should know the existence of functio
ns like DECODE, IIF, GET_DATE_PART and so on. You can always come back to the do
cumentation 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 sh
ows the data flow, but you give all the connections and design the actual ETL Pr
ocesses using the work flow manager. This guide gives you all the necessary deta
ils. Once you know how to create a session task and a work flow, you can keep co
ming back to this guide as needed later on.

Performance Tuning Guide : Probably not when you get started, but once you devel
op some mapings and workflows, this is the place you l 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 Info
rmatica to get really familiar with the tool. Some of them would be
i) Slowly changing dimensions (look at the wizards for reference)
ii) truncate-load
iii) one work flow waiting on another (work flow dependencies)
iv) Loading Fact and Dimension Tables
and so on.
You can come across these scenarios in your project, on discussion boards like t
he IT-Toolbox, or any good ETL and Dimensional modeling books like the ones belo
w by Ralph Kimball and his team .
The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Complete Guide to Dimensional Modeling (Second E
dition)
The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit
Go through the different stages of ETL cycle and different kind of models and tr
y to implement them using Informatica.
For Administrators
I haven t really worked an Informatica administrator except as a back up , But fro
m 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 Guide
ii) Installation and Configuration Guide
iii) Power Connect Guide (based on the external environment that you have)
iv) Repository Guide (all deployments to higher environments)
v) Command Line reference
In most places I have seen, there is a common team for both database and Informa
tica administration. You would be a lot better off if you understand the underly
ing database concepts, administration, installation and recovery concepts.
Cheers..