WITHSTANDS STRESS

Informatica has been on an evolutionary path of improvement in the area of performance and the increasing challenges of scalability for ETL. With the increasing number and size of data sources, you face more stress on incremental data loads passing through more complex transformations. PowerCenter 5.0 responds to this problem with a couple of key architectural changes that leverage the available hardware power of SMP architectures.

PowerCenter 5.0 encapsulates source ETL into a job or session. One key advancement is that you can define source extracts by granular data partitions that can then run in parallel as separate tasks in the designer. In addition, the Server Manager now runs using one process for transformations and loading where each creates separate threads for pre- and post-session operations, reading data for extracts, transformations, and data loading. This new architectural approach significantly increases throughput of operations; as long as you design data partitions for loading into the sessions. PowerCenter then handles the rest of the hard work.

PERFORMANCE DRIVING

I took the product for a test drive on my Windows 2000 server machine and found the installation and configuration straightforward. I also discovered many enhancements that simplify data warehouse creation and management. Of course, I could not test many of the enterprise application integration and performance improvements, but I did spend some time talking with customers to validate the new functionality and improvements.

My setup of the server and repository manager was simple and leveraged my existing Oracle 8.17 RDBMS Enterprise Edition and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 installations. I then spent the majority of the time reviewing the Designer and built some data warehouse models. Building my transformations was easy, with the new debugger capabilities. I also found the new XML support simple and, with the wizard, quick to feed in files and even write them back out.

I took the Informatica metadata bridge (MX2) for a spin with Brio Technology Inc.'s Enterprise 6.2.2 and Business Objects SA's BusinessObjects 5.1. The concept here is to use metadata from PowerCenter directly in your business intelligence tools, through a COM API. Although Informatica has issued this interface in previous releases, I still ran into many frustrations getting the business intelligence tools to interface properly.

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT

Informatica will need to invest more in its metadata support, making PowerCenter more open and better in tune with evolving metadata standards. Informatica will need to take a leadership role to ensure that existing and future third-party information delivery and business intelligence tool vendors build better integration into the metadata repository.

The existing interfaces are a good first step but need to develop beyond the COM API and toward supporting J2EE and XML standards. Taking these steps should not be difficult for Informatica because it already supports XML as a source and target. But it's more important to incorporate XML as an exchange interface to the server. Doing so will set the product up for better industry support and increase its neutrality, leading to more efficient reading and writing of metadata into the repository.

Informatica also needs to put more effort into enterprise manageability and automation as companies continue to expand their use of the product into distributed enterprise environments. With a significantly large installed base of more than 1,300 customers, Informatica has no lack of customer feedback. And from my personal experience at the company's last user conference, I can attest to Informatica's commitment to customers and heeding their input about improving PowerCenter.

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PUT ENERGY IN POTENTIAL

Mark Smith [mark.smith@fullcirclestrategies.com] is principal and founder of Full Circle Strategies and an expert in the applied use of information and analytics in the areas of business intelligence, portals, and analytic applications.

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