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Informatica PowerCenter is widely used as an integration tool across many projects. This is being used in specific departments. It lets us connect to endless sources in order to pipe data out into different available repositories. Primarily it feeds our various data warehouse and data marts. Also this is being used in Salesforce implementation project to transfer data from Flat files and Relational databases to Salesforce Objects.
- Extracting, transforming and loading data to and from different databases.
- Development, testing and maintenance of code is fairly simple.
- Good performance even during processing of large amount of data.
- Amazing ability to connect with different types of sources and targets available in the market.
- Performance with ODBC drivers is comparatively slow which ends up in taking a lot of time.
- Deployment is bit complex.
- Clobs and Blobs datatypes are very difficult to handle.
November 19, 2019
Informatica Powercenter is widely used as an integration tool, very commonly across projects as well as across organizations. It addresses a whole suite of data problems, starting with data integration, data quality management, master data management, data masking, data virtualization, etc. The tool is extremely popular for its ability to gather data from disparate sources and homogenize it for consumption. There are several models it can be used in: Integrate data from data sources and landing it in a staging area for consumption, in data migration projects for moving data from legacy systems to newer infrastructure.
- Data integration - Informatica has always been a leader in the data integration space. The company has maintained its position by innovative solutions, keeping pace with technology development, providing connectors to most of the common platforms, and improving on services with time. It has the ability to integrate data from multi-cloud, hybrid, on-premise infrastructure setup. The data integration can happen in batch or in real time. The performance of Informatica data integration is among the best in class.
- Data migration - Informatica is widely used as a data migration tool. Lots of enterprises run their software on legacy infrastructure and at some point run into limitations associated with them. The large databases they use at that time make it extremely difficult to switch to the latest infrastructure and have a list of challenges. Informatica is great at addressing these challenges. It allows developers to create rule-based workflows that can be used to migrate any amount of data from old to the new infrastructure. Since Informatica is so successful at this, there is always use cases for reference and trained resources for executing a project.
- Application Integration - The corporate world is full of mergers and acquisitions which lead to one company's IT assets being moved/merged to another one. This requires a huge amount of work to homogenize the two systems so they can co-exist without breaking each other. Informatica is great at building pipelines to integrate many disparate applications.
- Data warehousing - Informatica is very commonly used for building data warehouse systems to fulfill the needs of enterprises and data marts to service requirements of individual requirements. This helps organizations' ability to use data sets for driving decision making. For example, Sales teams can decide how their previous sales efforts have performed in various geographies by analyzing the data warehouse data for sales.
- Tool Management - Informatica over time has become a behemoth of data integration and warehousing world. It has built a vast array of tools to address various user needs. This does not bode well for the future looking at all the newer technologies which do not have so much of tech burden. Most new tools have a great cloud version where you can hop onto a URL, do your work and deploy it in minutes. With Informatica, you still have multiple client tools just to be able to deploy a single workflow and monitor as it runs. This can be both confusing and overwhelming to users.
- Only commercial data integration - There is no open-source version of Informatica PowerCenter so it is not the most useful for small enterprises or individuals that wish to use it but can't afford the maintenance fee that can be quite a burden. Such users head over to open-source competitors that provide data integration services.
- Lack of integration with other technologies - It is not very easy to blend in code from other languages like Java, Python, R, etc. Most of the tools these days provide such functionality making lives of users easier. Lack of such capability may cause users to build multiple hops in a data pipeline.
- Inbuilt reporting - Although Informatica has been around for the longest time, it has not made the best use of all the data capabilities it has. With the amount of data flowing through power center, it should have been easy to provide some sort of reporting features that add immense value to a user's work. However, Informatica has not made great use of this opportunity.
April 12, 2019
Informatica Power Center is easy to understand, gives you the opportunity to perform fast development, and also supports a multi-user development environment with a check-out/check-in mechanism. It performs transformation levels of ETL (Extract & Transform & Load) very fast.
Advanced security features also help you to perform administration more easily and with confidence.
Advanced security features also help you to perform administration more easily and with confidence.
- Transformation speed.
- Supports a multi-User development environment.
- A fast learning curve.
- It needs additional hardware.
- Lots of windows sometimes reduce your focus.
- It would be better to have a more compact design with the ability to aim toward specific topics.
March 07, 2019
We use PowerCenter throughout the organization, under a centralized IT implementation with a decentralized (or divisional) user base. It has been our mainstay and go-to ETL tool for many years. From SAP to Oracle to SQL, it lets us connect to just about anything in order to pipe data out into different repositories. Mainly it feeds our various data warehouse and data marts, but we also use it to extract data from our old CRM system into our Salesforce transition.
- The number of connectors, and the coverage for all the possibilities, are excellent, giving us the comfort that we won’t have to build anything custom.
- The flow visualizations are very nice, as we often have to go in and forensically review work done by others who are no longer with the company. This helps us accurately identify source data.
- The alert system is a great feature I think is often underutilized. We’ve been able to set up a great communication tree of notifications when a job fails, saving our DBA’s a lot of time sending out emergency communications.
- The pricing on the connectors is inflated, in my opinion. Plus, the fact you have to pay for them twice if you also utilize IICS (Informatica Cloud). I think you should only have to pay once, regardless of what platform from the vendor you are using. This is a big Con for me, as a manager that has to budget for these things.
- It requires more in-depth training than some of the other ETL tools we use, including Informatica Cloud. With Cloud, you can guess and be right 99% of the time. With PowerCenter, you need a few weeks of training, and then still have to ask an expert.
- Setting up secure agents is always difficult, but I’ve seen it done better with other tools like MULE. With Informatica, you tend to need 12 people in a room from all over the business to troubleshoot why the connection is not working.
December 10, 2018
Informatica PowerCenter is the enterprise ETL tool used for all data integration across the organization. PowerCenter is utilized for all on premises data integration including the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system as well as disparate systems including scheduling and time management systems.
- Enforces enterprise wide ETL development standards.
- Provides code re-usability with shared connections and objects.
- Particularly adept at integrating a wide range of disparate data sources (handles flat files particularly well).
- Well suited for moving large amounts of data.
- There are too many ways to perform the same or similar functions which in turn makes it challenging to trace what a workflow is doing and at which point (ex. sessions can be designed as static or re-usable and the override can occur at the session or workflow, or both which can be counter productive and confusing when troubleshooting).
- The power in structured design is a double edged sword. Simple tasks for a POC can become cumbersome. Ex. if you want to move some data to test a process, you first have to create your sources by importing them which means an ODBC connection or similar will need to be configured, you in turn have to develop your targets and all of the essential building blocks before being able to begin actual development. While I am on sources and targets, I think of a table definition as just that and find it counter intuitive to have to design a table as both a source and target and manage them as different objects. It would be more intuitive to have a table definition and its source/target properties defined by where you drag and drop it in the mapping.
- There are no checkpoints or data viewer type functions without designing an entire mapping and workflow. If you would like to simply run a job up to a point and check the throughput, an entire mapping needs to be completed and you would workaround this by creating a flat file target.
Our data integration team uses Informatica for extracting, transforming, and loading data into our data warehouse. It allows us to load data from a variety of different sources, reuse transformations, and sync work across a number of employees.
- Shared objects allow transformations, sources, and targets to be reused.
- Mapplets allow for blocks of transformations to be reused.
- Field by field transformations.
- Union and join a variety of data sources.
- UI is a little ugly - looks like pictures of the tool from 10+ years ago.
- Needs undo. Really, it doesn't have undo? Yes. Really.
March 09, 2017
Informatica enterprise data integration tools have been used in my company across different departments for enterprise data warehouses, data marts, data movements etc. It addresses or provides data for different business purposes for my company such as BI reporting and real data dashboards etc.
- Informatica Power Center tools are very effective on extracting, transforming and loading bulk data such as hundreds of millions of database rows or raw data flat files, XML files etc., out of or into all kinds of platforms such as databases (Oracle, DB2, SQL server, MySQL, any database that you can name it), OS (UNIX, Linux, Windows), web services, and real time such as IBM MQ.
- A single toolset to be used for all kinds of platforms, for bulk data loads, for real-time loads, or web services.
- The Informatica web service interface can be improved from a performance point of view and also from a troubleshooting point of view.
Our firm provides consultancy to several federal government clients. Currently we are using Informatica Powercenter for aDHS - USCIS client to perform ETL on daily basis (both initial full load and incremental load) into various data marts. It helps in moving data from one source to another, mainly to a data warehouse to help generate reports.
- Data migration from multiple sources. It handles any type of source data including RDBMS, flat files, XML, mainframe etc.
- Implementing data migration rules is very easy and efficient and reusable.
- Development and maintenance of code is very easy. Design, development and scheduling of full load and incremental load is very easy.
- Provides lot of features for developers to implement any kind of business rules.
- Not worth doing simple data migration using powercenter.
- Licensing cost.
- Handling Blobs and clobs data types.
October 30, 2015
PowerCenter is used in multiple applications across our company. PowerCenter mappings load the data warehouse and various data marts for our marketing and executive teams. The Informatica Cloud platform, based on the PowerCenter engine, replicates data from our Salesforce deployment for downstream consumers. PowerCenter, along with the Informatica Data Quality offering, is utilized to cleanse and land source information for our Master Data Management platform. We utilize PowerCenter and the PowerExchange connector for Salesforce to publish the best version of the truth to the source systems. The tools address the issue of timely and efficient data loads, and to be able to apply data standards and business rules across multiple disparate platforms.
- PowerCenter connects to multiple sources and targets with ease, and at the same time.
- PowerCenter allows the application of complicated business rule logic with ease through a user friendly interface.
- PowerCenter logic can be captured and shared in mapplets, enabling reusability.
- Documentation of how the different offerings in the Informatica product line work together as a total data platform, and licensing across those offerings. This information is difficult to come by and more often than not requires Informatica Professional Services assistance.
- Copy and paste of elements to provide additional documentation and coding capabilities.
- Interface with industry standards such as Microsoft Excel.
December 19, 2018
Informatica PowerCenter provides a robust Extract Transform and Load (ETL) engine that is both scalable and flexible. I have implemented informatica PowerCenter for a variety of government agencies to meet a variety of different requirements. Informatica is used to integrate data, build data marts or data warehouses to support decision support systems, disseminate data or even ingest data into COTs applications. It is all about being able to move or transform your data so it is usable by your business.
- Informatica is a proven enterprise ETL tool that scales and provides a graphical interface to code your data mappings.
- Reading, Transforming and Loading Data to and from databases.
- Process incoming data such as messages in real-time.
- Data Cleansing.
- Web Services / Services.
- Modeling your data models.
April 18, 2018
Informatica Power Centre is primarily used by the analytics team in our organization to build our ETL workflows. Informatica lies at the heart of all our data pipelining, right from sourcing from the databases all the way through loading to visualization tools and supporting business queries. On a larger picture, it provides a very smooth platform for data movement.
- Informatica has a wide range of support for databases. Pretty much every mainstream DBMS is compatible here.
- Designing ETL mappings and workflows is a very intuitive process, and takes minimal learning time and effort even for a beginner.
- Informatica's biggest strength is its sheer performance. It is unmatched in terms of handling large volumes of data.
- Setting up Informatica and integrating with your existing services can be a hassle. While the support team is quite helpful, it can still take a considerable amount of time and effort to get Informatica up and running.
- Informatica Enterprise Data Integration unavailable for MacOS. This can be a huge problem for a business that primarily uses Apple machines.
- Using Informatica PowerCenter for ETL designing can be quite intuitive for basic to moderately complex workflows. However, for achieving advanced tasks, there is not sufficient documentation available.
March 06, 2018
Predominantly by the IT dept. It addresses enterprise data integration challenges, integrates with enterprise service bus for data movements
- Multi platform connectivity, including Hadoop and Cloud providers
- Deployment and Licensing flexibility
- Pricing
- Skills availability in the market
- Deployment is flexible, but deployment needs to be more simpler
- Difficult ingesting very large datasets, though Informatica's Big Data Edition makes it simple (but that comes at an additional cost)
March 31, 2017
PowerCenter is being used to automate our ETL processes. We have implemented data pipelines to ingest and transform data from our clients. PowerCenter work flows also load data into a DBMS platform and create SAS data libraries.
- PowerCenter processes input files, performs specified transformations, and maps the input data format to the output data format very quickly. The PowerCenter backend implementation seems to be optimized to process and map structured input records to structured output records and load the records into a database. One of the strengths of PowerCenter is performance of processing petabytes of structured input data files.
- PowerCenter does not require a software development experience or education. After providing initial hands-on training, the data consultants (who are statisticians, subject matter experts) in our organization were able to implement data ingest and data transformation tasks fairly easily.
- PowerCenter supports multiple DBMS technologies (for example, Oracle, Netezza). This flexibility allows it to be used by multiple departments within our organization.
- One of the challenges of PowerCenter is the lack of integration between the components and functionality provided by PowerCenter. PowerCenter consists of multiple components such has the repository service, integration service, metadata service. Considerable time and resources were required to install and configure these components before PowerCenter was available for use.
- In order to connect to various data sources such as Netezza database or SAS datasets, PowerCenter requires the installation and configuration of separate plug-ins. We spent considerable time trouble-shooting and debugging problems while trying to get the various plug-ins integrated with PowerCenter and get them up and running as described in the documentation.
- PowerCenter works well with structured data. That is, it is easy to work with input and output data that is pre-defined, fixed, and unchanging. It is much more difficult to work with dynamic data in which new fields are added or removed ad-hoc or if data format changes during the data ingest process. We have not been as successful in using PowerCenter for dynamic data.
- One of the challenges of learning PowerCenter is that it is difficult to find documentation or publications that help you learn the various details about PowerCenter software. Unlike SAS Institute, Informatica does not publish books about PowerCenter. The documentation available with PowerCenter is sparse; we have learned many aspects of this technology through trial and error.
Informatica is used to integrate to various applications like SAP, Salesforce etc. with Oracle and SQL databases. It's used by various departments across the Americas. It helps to optimize the data for various reporting tools.
- Tracking Changes in slowly changing dimensions
- Fact & multi-dimensional loading
- Integration of data from SAP and Salesforce is better with this ETL tool compared to other tools in the market
- Modularity
- Several partnerships diminishing the value of technologies
- Unable to get list of objects from Repository (like sources & targets) that don't have any dependency
- Scheduling: The built-in scheduling tool has many constraints such as handling Unix/VB scripts etc. Most enterprises use third party tools for this.
Our company bought Informatica PowerCenter around 5 years ago, when we initially set up the BI team in the IT department. After that it became one of the core platforms in IT for data-level workflow and reporting purposea.
- It is quite flexible to handle different type of data formats like DB objects or Tables
- Good performance when processing lots of data in batch
- Easy to learn and use
- The client is quite heavy in terms of size and function
- Better way to upgrade
- Test and deployment automation needs to be improved
October 09, 2013
- Informatica is a complex, full-featured data integration tool. We use Informatica primarily to extract data from our ERP systems, transform, and load it into operational and dimensional data stores.
- We have found that upgrading from version to version can be a bit clunky and complex.
- Watch out for their audit department. They will hunt down development environments that are in use and try to back charge you for their repositories. Ensure your development environments are properly licensed.
August 03, 2016
Powercenter is used heavily by the IT processing departments at my organization in support of the end users in various business departments. In short, it is the backend process for a majority of the company, but only a small percentage of employees use the tool itself in a day to day basis.
- The tool is excellent at pulling data from source systems, modifying it to fit a target system, and then pushing the data accordingly.
- It handles conversion of datatypes very well
- PowerCenter is very adapt at applying data filters and 'business rules' to source data before pushing the results to the end user.
- As a developer/integrator, i feel that PowerCenter could use improvement, and that is in the area of automated deployments. There isn't really any scripting options to automate back end deployments of ETL Workflows from one environment to the next. Instead, everything has to be done via the GUI (Graphical User Interface). And while this is a relatively straight forward process, it can be time consuming.
- There is no real interface between PowerCenter and programs that manage the encapsulation of password for System Accounts. All connections to source and target systems have to be updated via the Power Center Workflow Manager GUI, and entered manually. There is no interface with encryption programs such as MAC VAULT, and as such, admins are required to have access to passwords that information security departments might otherwise not want them to have.
PowerCenter is being used across the organization for all our ETL needs, be it generating flat files from different sources or loading data from legacy systems into data warehouse or integrating multiple systems for reporting needs.
- Ability to work with different types of sources and targets.
- Version control of the code.
- Ability to integrate with LDAP for security.
- Ease of use.
- Performance with ODBC drivers can be improved.
- Memory utilization is very high during ETL execution.
- Improved scheduling capabilities for in built scheduler.
March 20, 2014
Informatica is used to integrate to various applications like SAP, Salesforce etc. with Oracle and SQL databases. It's used by various departments across the Americas. It helps to optimize the data for various reporting tools.
- Integration of data from SAP and Salesforce is better with this ETL tool compared to other tools in the market
- Tracking Changes in slowly changing dimensions
- Fact & multi-dimensional loading
- Modularity
- Scheduling: The built-in scheduling tool has many constraints such as handling Unix/VB scripts etc. Most enterprises use third party tools for this.
- Several partnerships diminishing the value of technologies
- Unable to get list of objects from Repository (like sources & targets) that don't have any dependency
Informatica PowerCenter Scorecard Summary
Feature Scorecard Summary
What is Informatica PowerCenter?
Informatica PowerCenter is a metadata driven data integration technology designed to form the foundation for data integration initiatives, including analytics and data warehousing, application migration, or consolidation and data governance.
Categories: Data Integration
Informatica PowerCenter Technical Details
| Operating Systems: | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application: | No |