I was using Informatica PowerCenter as an ETL to to feed data into Teradata datawarehouse that houses customer information for an insurance company.

Informatica PowerCenter is a good ETL tool for users who wish to develop a datawarehouse but do not have much programming experience. It has a nice interface where the user can simply drag and drop to create a data flow. It is very intuitive and user friendly.

PowerCenter is a heavy software and installation is not a trivial task. It uses a lot of memory and it could crash the system if it does not have enough resources.

It's good but yeah not too good

1. Drag and drop services 2. Easily maintain 3. Run multiple batch jobs 4. Define methods with logistics

1. Can't schedule in workflow 2. Job running status logs are too long 3. Doesn't have parallel off functionality 4. Can't be sync with repository automatically

If you are a PowerCenter expert you can do almost any data transformation.

It is very complex and difficult to use. Super expensive and with minimal suport.

Ease to work

It Works vwell with large structured data files PowerCenter processes input files, performs specified transformations, and maps the input data format to the output data format very quickly. The PowerCenter backend implementation seems to be optimized to process and map structured input records to structured output records and load the records into a database. One of the strengths of PowerCenter is performance of processing petabytes of structured input data files. PowerCenter does not require a software development experience or education. After providing initial hands-on training, the data consultants (who are statisticians, subject matter experts) in our organization were able to implement data ingest and data transformation tasks fairly easily. PowerCenter supports multiple DBMS technologies (for example, Oracle, Netezza). This flexibility allows it to be used by multiple departments within AT&T organization.

PowerCenter processes input files, performs specified transformations, and maps the input data format to the output data format very quickly. The PowerCenter backend implementation seems to be optimized to process and map structured input records to structured output records and load the records into a database. One of the strengths of PowerCenter is performance of processing petabytes of structured input data files. PowerCenter does not require a software development experience or education. After providing initial hands-on training, the data consultants (who are statisticians, subject matter experts) in our organization were able to implement data ingest and data transformation tasks fairly easily. PowerCenter supports multiple DBMS technologies (for example, Oracle, Netezza). This flexibility allows it to be used by multiple departments within our organization.

When joining Informatica I have to say, the whole process was a very nice and comforting transition. I was very impressed by level of care, focus and how they approached the recruitment process. The Human resources and Management team are a really great bunch of people and I believe we made the right choice together. They gave me confidence in how the company is run, they were clear and concise on how the company structure works and what the expectations are. The company progression is great, already I'm gaining more responsibility and growing and learning more about the industry, so on this I would certainly recommend Informatica as a prospect to anyone looking for an Innovative, Positive, growing and fun company to work for

Scheduler tools can manage dependencies accross many systems and environments. For instance you can configure it so that your informatica job only runs after the successful completion of some other system's windows job and/or another system's batch job.