Informatica PowerCenter 8x Key Concepts – 2

The PowerCenter Repository is one of best metadata storage among all ETL products. The repository is sufficiently normalized to store metadata at a very detail level; which in turn means the Updates to therepository are very quick and the overall Team-based Development is smooth. The repository data structure is also useful for the users to do analysis and reporting.

Accessibility to the repository through MX views and SDK kit extends the repositories capability from a simple storage of technical data to a database for analysis of the ETL metadata.

PowerCenter Repository is a collection of 355 tables which can be created on any major relational database. The kinds of information that are stored in the repository are,

1. Repository configuration details
2. Mappings
3. Workflows
4. User Security
5. Process Data of session runs

For a quick understanding,

When a user creates a folder, corresponding entries are made into table OPB_SUBJECT; attributes like folder name, owner id, type of the folder like shared or not are all stored.
When we create\import sources and define field names, datatypes etc in source analyzer entries are made into opb_src and OPB_SRC_FLD.
When target and related fields are created/imported from any database entries are made into tables like OPB_TARG and OPB_TARG_FLD.
Table OPB_MAPPING stores mapping attributes like Mapping Name, Folder Id, Valid status and mapping comments.
Table OPB_WIDGET stores attributes like widget type, widget name, comments etc. Widgets are nothing but the Transformations which Informatica internally calls them as Widgets.
Table OPB_SESSION stores configurations related to a session task and table OPB_CNX_ATTR stores information related to connection objects.
Table OPB_WFLOW_RUN stores process details like workflow name, workflow started time, workflow completed time, server node it ran etc.
REP_ALL_SOURCES, REP_ALL_TARGETS and REP_ALL_MAPPINGS are few of the many views created over these tables.

PowerCenter applications access the PowerCenter repository through the Repository Service. The Repository Service protects metadata in the repository by managing repository connections and using object-locking to ensure object consistency.

We can create a repository as global or local. We can go for‘global’ to store common objects that multiple developers can use through shortcuts and go for local repository to perform of development mappings and workflows. From a local repository, we can create shortcuts to objects in shared folders in the global repository. PowerCenter supports versioning. A versioned repository can store multiple versions of an object.

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