Informatica 9 Architecture

Informatica 9 Architecture

Informatica came up with Service Oriented Architecture during release of Informatica 8.x. With 9.x there are additions and enhancements to existing 8.x architecture. Below diagram details various components used in 9.0.1/9.1.0 and how they interact with each other. There are few points worth noting:

• Service Oriented Architecture means that various components within Informatica encapsulate core functionalities and these components are composed together to build various Informatica products.
• Informatica follows a Model Driven Architecture where all the domain objects are modeled. Note that model refers to structure of the objects, their attributes/types, and so on. Also, the core meta-models are shared across all Informatica products which help various tools to interact with each other. For example, with the help of such model Informatica Analyst tool can talk to Informatica Developer.

Informatica 9 Architecture block diagram

Administrator Console: This is a web based platform where an administrator can setup and control how Informatica will be set-up. This involves setting up and maintenance of domain, nodes, and various services such as Repository Service. This tool also provides Security Control like adding groups, users and their access to repository.Let’s understand what various building blocks represent in above architecture diagram in brief.

• Informatica Services Platform (ISP): The ISP is the administrative framework for Informatica services. It allows monitoring, start/stop, and fail over of services. It is extensible through plug-ins for additional services. ISP supports single point of administration. And, it allows integration with LDAP active directory. It provides a set of core services used internally, like Authentication Service, Name Services, and so on.
• Informatica Modeling Framework (IMF): Supports serialization and cross language model exchange. The MRS provides automated persistence of models. It looks at the model to determine how to persist objects. The default persistence scheme can be customized. Repository capabilities are model agnostic. MRS provides metadata search and import/export. MRS allows you to add the model definitions dynamically. Like, adapter meta models.
• Model Repository Service (MRS): The MRS provides automated persistence of models. It looks at the model to determine how to persist objects. The default persistence scheme can be customized. Repository capabilities are model agnostic. MRS provides metadata search and import/export. MRS allows you to add the model definitions dynamically. Like, adapter meta models.
• Data Integration Service (DIS): DIS is the container for all data integration functionalities. DIS plug-ins provide different data integration functionalities. The different plug-ins are as follows:

•        Profiling service plug-in translates profile into mappings

•        SQL Service plug-in translates SQL into mappings

•        Mapping Service executes data quality plans

It provides common services to its plug-ins: request dispatch, thread pooling, and so on. And, it also provides mapping execution using embedded Data Transformation Manager (DTM).

• Data Transformation Manager (DTM): DTM Interprets and executes mappings. It is re-engineered to be lightweight and embeddable. It allows repository-less execution: In previous versions of PowerCenter, DTM connects to the repository to fetch the plan. However, now the mapping can be run without reading from the repository, like mapping stored to disk. DTM enables concurrent execution semantics: multiple DTM instances can coexist in the same process. It supports logical transforms, which are translated to executable transforms before execution. It allows different execution modes: single threaded and pipelined execution modes. DTM comes up with optimal execution plan for mappings.
• Web Services: Informatica 9.1 has native Web Services capability in Informatica Data Services. You can publish logical data objects and transformations as Web Service end point. You can also consume externally or internally provided web service as part of a SQL DS, Web Service or a Data Quality mapping.

This is just an overview of various components used in revamped architecture. If you need more details on these components or have any questions, feel free to leave comments.