1. What is Informatica? Explain its key features and components
Informatica is a leading data integration platform used for extracting, transforming, and loading (ETL) data from various sources into a target database or data warehouse. Its key features include comprehensive connectivity, powerful transformations, and workflow automation, while its components consist of tools like PowerCenter for data integration, Data Quality for cleansing and validation, and Master Data Management for unified data governance.
2. Differentiate between Informatica PowerCenter and Informatica Cloud
Informatica PowerCenter is an on-premises data integration platform offering robust ETL capabilities for large-scale data processing, whereas Informatica Cloud is a cloud-based integration platform as a service (iPaaS) solution designed for seamless data integration across cloud and on-premises applications, offering agility and scalability without the need for on-site infrastructure.
3. What are the various transformations available in Informatica PowerCenter? Explain a few of them
Various transformations in Informatica PowerCenter include Filter, Router, Joiner, and Aggregator. The Filter transformation allows you to specify conditions for selecting rows, while the Aggregator transformation performs aggregate calculations like sum, average, or count on groups of data.
4. How do you handle error handling in Informatica mappings?
Informatica mappings, error handling can be managed using error handling strategies such as configuring error handling properties for individual transformations to redirect error rows to error tables or files, and utilizing error handling transformation like Error Handling or Error Transformation to handle errors dynamically within the mapping flow.
5. Explain the concept of workflow in Informatica
In Informatica, a workflow represents a set of instructions or tasks that are executed in a specific sequence to perform data integration operations. It orchestrates the execution of sessions, which are the tasks responsible for extracting, transforming, and loading data. Workflows can include various components like sessions, tasks, and dependencies, allowing for the orderly execution of data integration processes.
6. What is a session task in Informatica? How do you configure it?
A session task in Informatica is a component within a workflow responsible for executing a data integration session. It manages the execution of mappings, which define the data transformations and flow. To configure a session task, you specify details such as the mapping to be executed, the source and target connections, session properties like database connections, error handling, and performance tuning parameters within the Informatica workflow designer.
7. How do you optimize the performance of Informatica mappings?
To optimize the performance of Informatica mappings, you can employ several strategies such as utilizing partitioning and parallelism to distribute data processing, optimizing SQL queries within transformations, leveraging pushdown optimization to push processing to the database, using lookup caches efficiently, and tuning session properties like buffer sizes and commit intervals.
8. Explain the difference between static and dynamic cache in Informatica.
In Informatica, a static cache is populated at the start of the session and remains unchanged throughout the session, while a dynamic cache is populated as the session runs and can be updated or modified during runtime based on the input data. Static caches are suitable for reference data that doesn't change frequently, while dynamic caches are useful for frequently changing data or data that needs to be updated during the session
9. What are reusable transformations, and how do you create them in Informatica?
Reusable transformations in Informatica are transformations that can be used across multiple mappings. They promote reusability, consistency, and maintainability by allowing you to define transformation logic once and use it in multiple places. You create reusable transformations by designing them within the Transformation Developer tool in Informatica PowerCenter, saving them in the appropriate folder, and then adding them to mappings as needed.
10. How does Informatica handle incremental aggregation?
Informatica handles incremental aggregation by utilizing the "Incremental Aggregation" option within the Aggregator transformation. This feature enables the transformation to perform aggregate calculations only on the new or changed data since the last run, reducing processing time and improving efficiency in scenarios where only incremental updates are required.
