Informatica Architecture

Informatica ETL tool consists of following services & components.

1. Repository Service – Responsible for maintaining Informatica metadata & providing access of same to other services.
2. Integration Service – Responsible for the movement of data from sources to targets
3. Reporting Service - Enables the generation of reports
4. Nodes – Computing platform where the above services are executed
5. Informatica Designer - Used for creation of mappings between source and target
6. Workflow Manager – Used to create workflows and other task & their execution
7. Workflow Monitor – Used to monitor the execution of workflows
8. Repository Manager – Used to manage objects in repository

Informatica Domain

The overall architecture of Informatica is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Informatica Domain is the fundamental administrative unit in Informatica tool

It is a collection of nodes and services. Further, this nodes and services can be categorized into folders and sub-folders based on the administration requirement.

Node is a logical representation of a machine inside the domain. Node is required to run services and processes for Informatica.

You can have multiple nodes in a domain. In a domain, you will also find a gateway node.

The gateway node is responsible for receiving requests from different client tools and routing those requests to different nodes and services.

There are two types of services in Domain

Service Manager: Service manager manages domain operations like authentication, authorization, and logging. It also runs application services on the nodes as well as manages users and groups.

Application Services: Application service represents the server specific services like integration service, repository service, and reporting service. These services run on different nodes based upon the configuration.

PowerCenter Repository

PowerCenter repository is a relational database like Oracle, Sybase, SQL server and it is managed by repository service. It consists of database tables that store metadata.

There are three Informatica Client tools available in Informatica Powercenter. They are Informatica

• Designer
• Workflow Monitor
• Workflow Manager

These clients can access to the repository using repository service only.

To manage a repository there exists an Informatica service called Repository Service. A single repository service handles exclusively only one repository. Also, a repository service can execute on multiple nodes to increase the performance.

The repository services use locks on the objects, so multiple users cannot modify the same object same time.

You can enable version control in the repository. With the version control feature, you can maintain different versions of the same object.

Objects created in the repository can have following three state

• Valid: Valid objects are those objects whose syntax is correct according to Informatica. These objects can be used in the execution of workflows.
• Invalid: Invalid objects are those who does not adhere to the standard or rules specified. When any object is saved in Informatica, it is checked whether its syntax and properties are valid or not, and the object is marked with the status accordingly.
• Impacted: Impacted objects are those whose child objects are invalid. For example in a mapping if you are using a reusable transformation, and this transformation object becomes invalid then the mapping will be marked as impacted.