Informatica PowerCenter

Informatica Powercenter is the centerpiece of our overall enterprise data warehouse strategy. It's a critical enablement to ensure we can feed in multiple data stream and transform them into digestible data within our data warehouse. With its flexible capabilities and API availability, we were able to feed in industry standard data format as well as home grown data structure. Overall, we are very pleased with their capability and contribution to our data warehouse strategy.

This is an amazing tool to handle large data in multiple batches. Also, this is best suited if you have data in different data sources but if you are looking for a tool to use with single data source then there are multiple tools available in the market which are comparatively cheaper.

On-time and satisfactory replies from support team if any issue is raised.

Informatica PowerCenter, being a very mature technology leader, is well suited for large data integration projects where many different data sources exist and multiple departments need to use the data. In such cases, it is best to use a tool like power center to create a data warehouse and datamarts. These organizations usually can have in-house Informatica admins that can take care of software maintenance, contribute to performance improvement, troubleshooting, etc. They are also looking for a long term solution rather than a quick fix for data access issues. The tool may not be well suited for smaller organizations that tend to be more nimble and prefer more flexibility in building their technology landscape rather than being tied to a single tool that may define their overall data warehousing strategies. This also means that organizations do not have to maintain large software and employ dedicated people for doing that.

Informatica power center is a leader of the pack of ETL tools and has some great abilities that make it stand out from other ETL tools. It has been a great partner to its clients over a long time so it's definitely dependable. With all the great things about Informatica, it has a bit of tech burden that should be addressed to make it more nimble, reduce the learning curve for new developers, provide better connectivity with visualization tools.

If you have many developers who will use Informatica Power Center for more than 80% of their work, multi-user development will reduce your administration effort with less chance of losing code.
When data is loaded to the Informatica Application Server, transformations perform very fast. It also supports push down ETL if your ETL mappings are simple or have average complexity.

I think anything where you need to shuttle data in/out of one complex system and into another is a great fit for PowerCenter (on prem). The “Upsert” function of updating and inserting has saved us countless dollars in storage space and the in/out transfer of data to the cloud, so if you are pulling data out of your on-prem systems and moving it to the cloud, this is the tool for you. Coupled with a good Data Warehouse or Data Lake strategy, you can be ELT instead of ETL, as well. Makes feeding your BI Tools fast and easy.

Informatica PowerCenter is great for creating data marts or data warehouses in star schema.

Informatica PowerCenter doesn't provide native capabilities for data cleansing, such as USPS zip code validation. You must code this manually.

PowerCenter is well equipped to handle large amounts of data movement in an organization with many disparate sources and a structured development team. It excels in enforcing enterprise development standards through things like metadata manager and the monitoring capabilities (as well as being able to design monitoring rules for everything from naming standards to design practices). It is especially well suited at handling flat-file data in addition to its many connectors and native support for just about any ANSI standard database. For large development teams or the desire to remain flexible at an enterprise scale, Powercenter is a top-tier solution.

For small projects or even smaller development teams with mostly a single data source, expect frustration with being able to quickly test a solution as the design flow is very structured. It is also designed in a way that segregation of duties at a very high level can also cause small development teams to be counter-productive. Each step in the design process is a separate application, and although stitched together, is not without its problems. In order to design a simple mapping for example, you would first need a connection established to the source (example, ODBC) and keep in mind that it will automatically name the container according to how you named your connection. You would then open the designer tool, import a connection as a source, optionally check it in, create a target, optionally check it in as well, and design a transformation mapping. In order to test or run it, you will need to open a separate application (Workflow Manager) and create a workflow from your mapping, then create a session for that workflow and a workflow for those one or more sessions at which point you can test it. After running it, in order to observe, you then need to open a separate application (Monitor) to see what it is doing and how well. For a developer coming from something like SSIS, this can be daunting and cumbersome for building a simple POC and trying to test it (although from the inverse, building an enterprise scalable ETL solution from SSIS is its own challenge).

One of the main strengths of Informatica Enterprise Data Integration is its performance. If your business requirements include processing of huge volumes of data, then Informatica is strongly recommended over other tools. I would recommend Informatica over Talend.

On the other hand, if your business primarily works on Apple machines, Informatica Enterprise Data Integration is a resounding NO. Running Informatica on a VM or a Remote Desktop completely kills its efficiency.

Well suited when there are more diverse source platforms, and there's a need for integrating data movements across enterprise bus

Great for ETL especially when sourcing from various sources. Also handy when field by field or row by row transformations are needed. It may be less suited where quick bulk changes can be done.

DB level or flat file for reporting or analysis

Informatica Enterprise data integration tools are well suited in extracting/loading/transforming large amounts of data as batch loads. It can also be easily integrated with Hadoop on big data applications. But its real-time integration with MQ or Tibco may be a little overlapped with them for the functionalities.

PowerCenter is the top of the line tool for migrating data from one source to another. It excels at filtering and modifying data before deploying it into a target environment, usually for end user use.

However, if you are looking for a tool to simply look at data from one source, there are other products out there. This is really designed for aggregating data and filtering/manipulating it into useful information.

PowerCenter is ideal where there is a need to implement complex data migration rules and perform incremental data load. It is very efficient, easy to maintain and modify the code. It is also very efficient in connecting to data sources including XML, Flat files, spreadsheets, RDBMS, mainframe etc.

In scenarios where we have to integrate data from heterogeneous sources into targets PowerCenter is the best tool as it can extract as well as load data by using native drivers of each of the different databases with a performance that is not matched by any of its competitors. By bringing power exchange, data quality, metadata management and data discovery under one instance, Informatica has simplified PowerCenter integration with above mentioned tools as well as maintenance of the instance.

PowerCenter is by far the industry leader when it comes to extract, transform and load applications. The ability to access a multitude of data sources and targets makes the product versatile. And the graphic user interface makes it easy to learn and use the tool with limited knowledge. Even business users can understand the mappings and logic applied.

Scalability
Modularity
Backward Compatability.
Easy Upgrade.
Support from Vendor

The tool should satisfy these criteria:

• Extraction of the data from legacy sources (usually heterogenous)
• Data transformation (data optimized for transaction --> data optimized for analysis)
• Synchronization and cleansing of the data
• Loading the data into data warehouse.

We are considering their PowerCenter Advanced version which will add metadata and business glossary capabilities.