The Lifeline of Informatica - Transformations

Transformations form the most important aspect of the Informatica PowerCenter tool. The functionality of any ETL tool lies in the transformations. Needless to say at this point, transformations are used to transform data. Informatica PowerCenter provides multiple transformations, each serving a particular functionality. Transformations can be created as reusable or non-reusable based on the requirement. The transformations created in workflow manager are non-reusable, and those created in task developer are reusable. You can create mapping with a single transformation or with multiple transformations.

When you run the workflow, integration service extracts the data in a row-wise manner from the source path/connection you defined in the session task and makes it flow from the mapping. The data reaches the target through the transformations you defined.

The data always flows in a row-wise manner in Informatica, no matter what your calculation or manipulation is. So, if you have 10 records in the source, there will be 10 source-to-target flows while the process is executed.

We will be talking about the following topics in this chapter:

• Adding transformation in mapping
• Ports of transformation
• Various transformations such as Expression, Aggregator, Sorter, Filter, Router, Lookup, Sequence Generator, Update Strategy, and so on
• Classification of transformation
• Tracing levels