What is Informatica PowerCenter?

What are the features of Informatica PowerCenter?

Its unique components are its best features and employers may ask about them in Informatica Interview Questions. Some elements have been discussed here:

• The Informatica domain serves as the primary entity for all management and administration needs.
• The PowerCenter repository is a relational Database. It contains tables that contain instructions for extracting, transforming, and loading data.
• Informatica Administrator is a web application for domain management and information security.
• Domain Configuration stores the data configured for the domain.
• PowerCenter Repository Service will help you to retrieve, insert, and update metadata from database tables.
• PowerCenter Integration Service allows you to read and manage integration workflows, so you can create multiple integrations to meet your business needs.
• Data from different sources is extracted and loaded into targets.
• The Web Services Hub is a gateway that exposes all key product features to external clients via web services.
• SAP BW Service helps to extract data from various sources and load it into SAP NetWeaver BI.
• PowerCenter Client consists of the tools needed to manage the data warehouse. It helps the client to design mappings, mapplets and sessions to load data.

What is ETL?

ETL is a type of data integration and includes an architecture that extracts, transforms and loads data into a database or target file.  It is the foundation of data warehouses.

An ETL system does the following:

• Extract data from source systems.
• Transform and clean the data.
• Index the data.
• Synthesize the data.
• uploads the data to the repository
• Tracks changes to source information in the repository.
• Restructures keys
• Maintains metadata.
• Reloads the repository with updated data.

Now that we have understood what ETL and the ETL process are. We can better understand why Informatica is the best solution in these cases. We will also understand typical real-world scenarios where Informatica can be of great use.

Prerequisites for Informatica

One of the prerequisites to Learn Informatica is knowledge of SQL, especially knowledge of functions, joins, subsequences, etc.

Any beginner can master Informatica programs, but knowledge of ETL, SQL, and data storage concepts is helpful. Knowledge of data storage systems/applications is also helpful, but not necessary, as Informatica Powercenter is an application used to extract data from and load data to storage systems/applications such as RDBMS, BigData, CRM, social media, web services, flat files, etc.

Who can switch to Informatica?

Although any data integration enthusiast can move into Informatica, it is more often the Informatica Careers that is chosen:

• Software Developers
• Analyst
• BI/ETL/DW professionals
• Mainframe developers and architects
• individual contributors to enterprise business intelligence

Informatica Job Roles

Informatica's most popular tools are Informatica PowerCenter, Informatica Power Exchange, and Informatica Reporting Services. Informatica PowerCenter is the most widely used ETL tool today. Capable of efficient data segmentation, parallel processing, innovative caching techniques and mass recovery, Informatica PowerCenter is used by companies in all industries.

Some of Informatica's most popular job profiles:

• Informatica Developer
• Analyst
• Computer Consultant
• Computer Analyst
• Computer Systems Administrator
• IT Applications Developer
• PM

Benefits of Informatica training

Informatica Training is being provided by many training providers. You may also get Informatica Tutorial for free or its price may be included in the fees. There are many benefits of completing training at Informatica. Each benefit is detailed below.

Integration

Informatica is one of the best platforms for data integration. Data integration can be done for large amounts of data and from multiple sources in less time than any other ETL tool. Informatica's data integration tool can run on a wide variety of systems and platforms. Informatica also enables tight integration.

High performance

Informatica uses the best technologies to improve performance in terms of quality and speed. It also helps optimize costs, which ultimately helps an organization transform the business through automation, reuse, and tuning. Informatica also creates a very simple environment for analysts to help them perform fast and efficient analysis. It also balances the load between the database box and the ETL server, which helps perform tasks in challenging situations.

Support for multiple databases of different types

Informatica offers consistent support for multiple databases such as TPump, Teradata MLoad, Parallel Transporter Fastload and more. It also supports multiple data types, which helps to get more business data flexibly.

Easy maintenance

With Informatica Workflow Monitor, you can easily monitor the workflow process. Informatica Workflow Monitor simplifies the process of identifying and recovering failed or underperforming jobs. It has a powerful ability to restart after a halt or failure. It has many features, such as automatic job logging and runtime monitoring that make it ideal for managed BI services.

Error management

Informatica has a centralized error logging system that records errors and discarded data in relational tables, which helps the technical team in error correction. Informatica Power Centre is a powerful tool for extracting, transforming and loading data to the desired target and due to its unique key features. It is widely used in data warehouses, which itself is a great technology for Data Warehousing.

Other benefits

• Powerful methods of integration with messaging systems.
• It has many built-in support functions that quickly create the most scalable and secure data.
• Has advanced features that can generate and parse complex XML.
• Dynamic partitioning for a high-performance system with highly scalable concurrent data processing.
• A unified, flexible and optimized low-cost environment to handle all data integration tasks.
• Improves enterprise agility by delivering secure and accurate data on time.
• Data is trusted, so your data is safe even in the event of a disaster.
• Continuously records data changes so you can track when, where, how and who made the changes.

Career advancement at Informatica

As an entry-level employee, you can expect to be hired as an entry-level ETL developer at Informatica and then work your way up to a senior developer/lead.

After 7-10 years of experience, you can work your way up to Informatica Administrator or Informatica Architect. Additional skills in BI and data warehousing can also help you become an ETL architect or BI/data architect.

Informatica job profiles

According to a survey, 30% of Informatica jobs are for developers, although the same opportunities are available for analysts, architects, and consultants. Base salaries for each of these titles like Informatica Developer Salary have steadily increased in recent months and are expected to continue to increase in the coming weeks. According to another survey, Informatica Developer Jobs gained 24 points from November 2015 to February 2016, making it one of the hottest Data Warehousing jobs.

Salary at Informatica

Due to the growing opportunities for professionals with Informatica skills, salaries in Informatica Jobs are also on an upward trend. A quick search on Indeed.com shows that the median salary for Informatica Developers in the U.S. is $102,000, which varies depending on experience.