Sunday, November 1, 2015

Informatica 9 Architecture Continued...

Integration Service Process

As mentioned earlier, whenever Integration Service receives a request to execute a workflow, it spawns an Integration Service Process. In admin community it is typically called as pmserver process. Please note that Integration Service can start one or multiple Integration Processes to run and monitor Workflows.
Whenever a workflow is scheduled or changed, Workflow Manager interacts with Integration Service Process. This interaction happens over TCP/IP.  Integration Service process locks the Workflow and then knocks the Repository Service to get metadata about Workflow. Repository Service intern connects to Repository Database – fetches desired information – and gives it back to Integration Service process.
Once Integration Service process receives metadata information back from Repository Service, it creates connections to Source and Target databases using ODBC or Native drivers. Integration Service process also creates connections to any lookup or stored procedure databases which are used by the Workflow. Once the data loading process is done, Integration Service process releases and closes all open database connections.
Integration Service process is also responsible to start DTM process that will actually execute Workflow Sessions. Integration Service process passes Parameter File and Session information to DTM process, that helps it to retrieve required metadata from the repository. Please refer to article Data Transformation Manager for details on DTM Process.
See the figure below for details of this interaction.


To summarize, Integration Service process is responsible to carry out below tasks:
  • Workflow Schedule Management
  • Locking Workflow Before Execution
  • Reading Parameter File
  • Creating Workflow Logs
  • Running any Tasks in Workflow (e.g., Email)
  • Creating DTM processes to run Workflow Sessions