Informatica Explained
Informatica is the name of the company that make software. Their most famous software they make is called Informatica Powercenter. Informatica Powercenter is the leading software tool for ETL and Business Intelligence. So what is Business Intelligence and what the hell is ETL?
What is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence is a set of tools and techniques where you get data from different data sources (SQL, Oracle, SAP, Excel etc) and store in a data warehouse. This data in the warehouse can be used for analytical purposes to try to understand the data and get insights from it.
What is Extract, Transform and Load (ETL)?
Extract data from various sources, transforming the data to meet your requirements and then load into target data warehouse.
A closer look at Informatica PowerCenter
Informatica PowerCentre is a bunch of applications. The applications can be divided into two categories as below:
Administration
There are two admin apps:
- Admin Console - Perform domain and repository service tasks like create/configure nodes and repos, start/stop/upgrade/delete, backup and restore.
- Repository Manager - Manage repositories including connections, objects folders and users and groups.
Development
There are 3 development apps:
- Designer - Create ETL mapping
- Workflow Manager - Create and start workflow
- Workflow Monitor - Monitor and control workflows