Informatica PowerCenter Reviews

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).

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 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.

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.

DB level or flat file for reporting or analysis

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.

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.