Preface

There has to be a motive behind everything, and there is one behind this book too: to present a technology to the readers in its simplest form. The simple thought behind writing this book is to put all the essential ingredients of Informatica, starting from basic things such as downloading, extraction, and installation to working on client tools and high-level aspects, such as scheduling, migration, and so on, in simple words. There are multiple blogs available across the Internet that talk about the Informatica tool but none present end-to-end answers. We have tried to put up all the steps and processes in a systematic manner to help you start learning easily. In this book, you will get a step-by-step procedure for every aspect of the Informatica PowerCenter tool.

Informatica Corporation (Informatica), which is a multi-million dollar company incorporated in February, 1993, is an independent provider of enterprise data integration and data quality software and services. The company enables a variety of complex enterprise data integration products, which include PowerCenter, PowerExchange, enterprise data integration, data quality, master data management, business-to-business (B2B) data exchange, application information life cycle management, complex event processing, ultra messaging, and cloud data integration.

In this book, we are going to learn about the PowerCenter tool from Informatica. PowerCenter is Informatica's most widely-used tool across the globe for various data integration processes. The Informatica PowerCenter tool helps with the integration of data from almost any business system in almost any format. This flexibility of PowerCenter to handle almost any data makes it the most widely used tool in the data integration world.

While writing this book, we have kept in mind the importance of live, practical exposure of the graphical interface of the tool to the audience and so you will notice a lot of screenshots illustrating the steps to help you understand and follow the process. We have arranged the chapters in such a way that we cover all the aspects of the Informatica PowerCenter tool, and we have also made sure they flow properly in order to achieve functionality.