What is Informatica

Informatica is Engine driven ETL tool mostly used in Data Integration and Data warehouse enviornment. It is supported on different environments ( UNIX, WINDOWS, MAINFRAME etc). Current version in Market is 8.x. It has different tools as
1. Designer
2. Workflow Manager
3. Workflow Monitor
4. Repository Manager
5. Administrator Console

Informatica server runs as service called PowerCenter server. Informatica server does the major work at execution time to extract/load/transform the data based on metadata.
Informatica maintains all its metadata in repository ( RDBMS based). At development time, all work done in designer and workflow manager is stored in repository. At run time informatica server get processing logic from repository.

I will talk detail about individual tools in next blog.