The challenges of providing information to the right business users to optimize business processes and organizational efficiencies have never been so complicated. The pressures on the personnel responsible for building the information architecture to meet these needs have strained IT resources and brought into question traditional methods of manually building extract, transform, load (ETL) programs to manage the data warehouse framework.

But automating the movement from a multitude of operational systems and external sources to data warehouses and distributing data to related data marts is now much simpler with release 5.0 of Informatica PowerCenter.

PowerCenter 5.0 is for database administrators or data warehouse project team personnel, regardless of whether their IT organization is centralized. The product comprises three main components: Designer, Repository Manager, and Server Manager.

The Designer gives you a point-and-click interface to create source and target definitions and source-to-target mappings.

The Repository Manager administers the repositories you use to create and maintain data warehouses and support data marts. These global and distributed secondary repositories store the metadata and business logic and enable their classification into projects and the creation of secured users and groups.

You use the Server Manager to administer distributed Informatica servers and create sessions that automate ETL processes.

This version represents an important step for Informatica. It addresses many of its existing customers' needs and handles much more complex and distributed data warehouse projects. The release focuses on three key areas: e-business and enterprise application integration, enterprise manageability, and performance improvements.

INTEGRAL INTEGRATION

The majority of global 2,000 corporations have standardized on some type of enterprise application for enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management from vendors such as SAP, PeopleSoft, and Siebel Systems. These systems have become critical sources of operational information, and directly sourcing them is now a standard requirement for ETL tools. Informatica's PowerConnect technology framework satisfies this requirement by letting you pull these sources directly into PowerCenter.

Informatica already supported SAP R/3 and PeopleSoft, but has made further enhancements to its metadata and application module support. The major addition is its support for Siebel Systems' CRM applications, which is quite a complexity of normalized transactional tables - as you'll agree if you know anything about the underlying data models. Informatica users are just getting their first taste of the new Siebel support, but customers have found the previously available SAP and PeopleSoft support invaluable to project implementations, as well as to saving money and assuring long-term manageability by moving away from custom ETL programs.

Data exchange between applications, and even with the Internet, is more standardized thanks to XML. Informatica has not only added support for sourcing and targeting XML, but also uses it as the foundation for importing and exporting metadata within PowerCenter.

It has been a goal of data warehousing to have a repository of historical information but also integrate near-realtime data from operational or external feeds of data to enable more timely business decisions. This goal was not feasible with more traditional data warehousing tools, but now the integration of near-realtime data through messaging systems or quick transaction updates is possible. Informatica supports this capability by fully integrating IBM MQ Series as a source or target. I spoke with some customers that have already begun to use this feature for bringing in delta updates and believe that it has the potential to streamline their data warehouse updates. This feature is now supported through the PowerConnect interface; it was more loosely integrated previously.

NEW MANAGEMENT

The role of the data warehouse DBA or team of designers in building and maintaining data warehouses is more complex than ever. One of the last things you want to deal with when building data warehouses is debugging transformations, data, and connectivity - an often tedious process. PowerCenter 5.0, after long demand, offers a visual debugger that lets designers run and debug mappings from within the designer. (See Figure 1.) With it, designers can set breakpoints, examine values, and step through mapping execution. The product also now uses local and global parameters and variables for mapping, which can save significant time during mapping development.

Critical in an enterprise environment is the ability to easily design, test, and deploy data warehouse projects. PowerCenter 5.0 adds the ability to copy specific sessions between folders and compare folders to ensure that any changes to projects are documented.

For many projects, you need to stream data to different targets based on logic. PowerCenter now lets you do this through a router transformation without building additional filters. Even more critical in the design of transformations are dynamic lookups, which can quickly reference an in-memory table of values. PowerCenter now also lets you persist lookup tables and cache them between sessions. These capabilities also greatly improve session performance within PowerCenter.