The Art of Informatica and Data Integration

Luckily, the designers at Informatica realized the complexity of some projects and the need for performance tuning and built the tool in such a way to allow us to utilize the Informatica built in functionality or to override some or all of the processing back to the database. The challenge arises when the developer has to decide how / where to create the transformations. It is never a simple answer of Strategy A is always the best way to do this task, or Strategy B always has faster performance for this sort of task. Rather it is an Art! In my opinion, an Art that takes many, many, years of honing your skills to know how to build the best mappings possible. Additionally, not just Informatica skills are needed as they are only 1 part of the equation. The other big skill is being distinguished in the source and target databases platforms. The developer that is hired to move data (the integration expert or ETL developer) must be distinguished at Informatica or your ETL tool of choice as well as your database platform. These two skills have to be used to perfectly balance ETL mappings allowing the database to do what it does best as well as the ETL Tool.