Informatica 8.6 Enhancements for Developers – 1

Informatica has released its latest version 8.6 covering all the hot fixes it released for the prior version 8.5 and including few new features. Since version 8, a Unified Admin Console has been designed for managing Integration and Repository services. These were discussed in earlier Blogs.

What does PowerCenter 8.6 bring new for the developers? Let us discuss PowerCenter 8.6 Client enhancements which will be useful to the developers.

1. Creating Targets from Transformations

We can create targets based on transformations in the workspace or navigator.

To create a target,

1. Right-click the transformation in the workspace and select the Create and Add Target option.

2. Alternatively, we can drag and drop the transformation in the Target Designer.

The target that is created has the same port definitions as the transformation from which it was created. We can edit the target definitions later. In addition, the target type is the same as that of the repository used.

2. Invalid/Invalidated renamed

In PowerCenter 7, the two states of objects were known as Invalid and Invalidated.

The exact meaning of these states is as follows:

Invalid – an object will not run,

Invalidated – an object may be invalid or may not run.

The difference between the two terms was not very clear. Therefore, to avoid any confusion, in PowerCenter 8.6, the two states have been renamed as Invalid and Impacted. While the Invalid state still implies that an object will not run, Impacted means that an object is affected by a change, and therefore, may not run.

Apart from the naming convention the icons are also changed in PowerCenter 8.

3. Propagating Port Descriptions

In the Designer, in addition to the other properties of port propagation, we can edit a port description and propagate the description to other transformations in the mapping.

4. Environment SQL Enhancements

In PowerCenter 8, environment SQL can be used to execute an SQL statement at the beginning of each transaction. The Integration Service executes transaction environment SQL at the beginning of each transaction. Environment SQL can still be used to execute an SQL statement at each connection to the database.

Use SQL commands that depend upon a transaction being opened during the entire read or write process. For example, the following SQL command modifies how the session handles characters:

ALTER SESSION SET NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS=CHAR

5. Flat File Enhancements

PowerCenter 8 includes enhancements for handling flat files. Some of these improve performance.

Flat files can now use Integer or Double data types.

In addition, target partitions can be merged. The flat file target merge options include:

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