Informatica PowerCenter 8.x/9.x Architecture Simplified

To understand any tool or technology, the first and foremost strategy is to understand the Architecture. Normally, we as a Developer don’t put in much importance to the Architecture assuming it to be more likely an ‘Admin‘s-cup-of-tea’. But it always works good to have a knowledge on the architecture that helps you understand how exactly the tool/technology is working. I have always been wondering to understand the Informatica PowerCenter architecture and here it is simplified.

Informatica PowerCenter:

PowerCenter is an Informatica environment that allows you to pull data from multiple Sources and load into various Targets. Basically, its helps you load data into a centralized location such as a Data warehouse or an Operational Data Source. What makes PowerCenter more powerful is the availability of various transformations that allows you to transform the data as per the desired Business logic and load into heterogeneous targets.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA):

Beyond Informatica version 8.6, PowerCenter possesses a Service Oriented Architecture.
SOA is an architecture where the Business Interface and all the other operations are connected and managed by Functions and Services.
Service: A Service is a representation of a software agent which connects and interacts between the service provider and the consumer. A Service acts as an intermediate towards providing the desired job when the owner sends a request

In case of PowerCenter, The PowerCenter server has been replaced with a service known as Integration Service and the Repository server has been replaced with a service known as Repository Service.

The Informatica Architecture comprises of the following components.

Server Components:

1. Repository Service
2. Integration Service

Client Components:

1. Repository Manager
2. Designer
3. Workflow Manager
4. Workflow Monitor

Server Components

1. Repository Service:

1. The Repository Service manages the metadata in the repository database. Also manages connections to the PowerCenter repository
2. The Repository Service manages connections to the repository from client applications. Mapping Designer, Workflow Manager, Workflow Monitor and Repository Manager interact with the Repository using the Repository Service
3. The Repository Service ensures the consistency of metadata in the repository. It is normally a multi-threaded process that retrieves, inserts, and updates metadata in the repository database tables.

2. Integration Service:

1    The Integration Server is the artery of the PowerCenter Architecture/Framework
2    When a workflow is started, the Integration Service reads metadata information (mapping,    session and session properties) from the repository.
3  It assigns and materializes the parameter/variable values, extracts data from the mapping sources and stores the data in memory while it applies the transformation rules configured in the mapping and then loads the transformed data into the mapping targets.

Client Components:

1. Repository Manager

• 1 Used by the Administrator for administration configuration purpose.
• 2 Manages the PowerCenter repository to assign permissions to users and groups, manage folders, and view PowerCenter repository metadata.

• Ø Normally, access to this component is not provided to everyone than of the Administrators

Designer

•  Used to Create and Design Mapping
•  Used to create/import Source, Target, mapplet and transformations. It’s a repository object
•  A Mapping can be said as a program that carries the metadata of the data flow. Once created it has to be saved to the Repository

Workflow Manager

• 1 Used to create session and workflows
• 2 A session can be called as a run time entity for the mapping. All the run time properties for the mapping are to be configured here. It’s a repository object

• 3A workflow is the minimum unit which can be run by the Integration service in the Informatica Server

• 4 Multiple Re-usable/ non-reusable Session objects can be created inside a single workflow

Workflow Monitor

• 1This is used to monitor the workflow load status

• 2 Various observation windows along with the log file capturing GUI is available for proper monitoring

Informatica Repository:
The Informatica repository is a relational database that stores information, or metadata, used by the Informatica Server and Client tools. This is the actual storage of Informatica PowerCenter.
Metadata: Its data about the data. It can also be referred as the Structure of the data without containing the actual data

• The Repository Server actually stores the Source, Target, Mapping, transformation, connection strings etc. It also saves the values of parameters and variables (if set to store explicitly)
• It stores the metadata in a proper Informatica readable standard and helps managing creation and deletion of Repositories.
• Along with the mapping information it also saves the administrative information such as roles, permissions, credentials and versions.

PowerCenter – Domain, Nodes & Services


PowerCenter- Domain

• The PowerCenter domain is the primary unit for management and administration within PowerCenter
• The PowerCenter – Service Manager runs on a PowerCenter – Domain. The Service Manager manages all the available Services in Informatica Power center
• A Domain is always a single PowerCenter installation
• A Domain comprises of several nodes and services.

PowerCenter – Nodes

• A Node is the logical presentation of a machine in a domain. That means, different machines can be called as different nodes
• Every node runs a service manager which manages all the PowerCenter services due to which PowerCenter provides high availability of resources
• Out of all the domains, a single node is called as the Gateway node which acts as the master interface between the nodes and the domain using its own service manager
• A node is available and said to be working only if the associated Service manager is up and running

PowerCenter – Services

• As part of the SOA Architecture, all the PowerCenter processes run on the node through Services associated to that node.
• Services are of two types : A Core Service and an Application Service

I hope, you should be at least having some idea on the PowerCenter architecture as of now. It always works good to have some knowledge on the Architecture for various benefits. One of the most important could be cracking an Interview chinna111.blogspot.com