What this book covers

Chapter 1, Starting the Development Phase – Using the Designer Screen Basics, talks about the basics of the Informatica PowerCenter Designer client tool. You will learn how to create/import files and tables as the source and target. You will also learn about the basic components of the client screen, such as the toolbar, navigator, workspace, output panel, and status bar. By the end of this chapter, you will have a clear idea of the look and feel of the PowerCenter tool.

Chapter 2, Using the Designer Screen – Advanced, talks about the advanced topics of the Designer screen. It is an extension of Chapter 1, Starting the Development Phase – Using the Designer Screen Basics. In this chapter, we will discuss debuggers, parameters and variables, target loan plan, reusable transformations, and mapplets.

Chapter 3, Implementing SCD – Using Designer Screen Wizards, covers a single but very important aspect of data warehousing, SCD. We will see the implementation of SCD1, SCD2, and SCD3 using wizards. You should be clear with data warehousing concepts to understand this implementation.

Chapter 4, Finishing the Development – Using the Workflow Manager Screen Basics, describes the basics of the Workflow Manager screen. We will get to learn the different options present on the Workflow Manager screen. We will learn how to create session tasks and workflows. We will also see various connections, such as relations, FTP, and so on, that can be created on the Workflow Manager screen.

Chapter 5, Using the Workflow Manager Screen – Advanced, teaches you the advanced concepts of the Workflow Manager screen. This chapter describes the various tasks present on the Workflow Manager screen. We will also see how to create reusable tasks and mapplets. We will learn some very important concepts, such as scheduling, partitioning and parameter files, file list, and incremental aggregation and workflow recovery options.

Chapter 6, Monitoring Your Code – Using the Workflow Monitor Screen, describes the Workflow Manager screen of PowerCenter. This screen allows you to monitor the process we execute in Workflow Manager. We will see different logfiles, statuses, and statistics on the Monitor screen.

Chapter 7, The Lifeline of Informatica – Transformations, is meant for the most important aspect of the Informatica PowerCenter tool, transformations. We will talk about the various types of transformations in this chapter. We will implement mapping using each transformation so that you get to understand each and every transformation in detail. We will end this chapter with the classifications of transformations.

Chapter 8, The Deployment Phase – Using Repository Manager, teaches you about the fourth client screen, Repository Manager. Repository Manager is basically used for migration (deployment) purposes. We will see the various options to migrate the code from one environment to other. We will also see how to create folders on the client screen.

Chapter 9, Optimization – Performance Tuning, has the contents for the optimization of the various components of the Informatica PowerCenter tool, such as sources, targets, mappings, sessions, and systems. Performance tuning at a high level involves two stages: finding issues called bottlenecks and resolving them.

Appendix, Installing Informatica and Using Informatica Administration Console, describes the detailed steps for the process of installation, starting from downloading the software, extracting the software, and installing the software, to configuring the software. We will also look at the administrator console of the PowerCenter tool and learn about the different services.