Lets go thru some Informatica(INFA) basics and lets see some other important things….

What are the differences between Power Center and  Power Mart???

• Power Mart is a departmental version of Informatica for building, deploying, and managing data warehouses and data marts. 

• Power center is used for corporate enterprise data warehouse and power mart is used for departmental data warehouses like data marts. 

• Power Center supports global repositories and networked repositories and it can be connected to several sources. Power Mart supports single repository and it can be connected to fewer sources when compared to Power Center. 

• Power Mart can extensibily grow to an enterprise implementation and it is easy for developer productivity through a code less environment.

Architecture Of Power Center

- PowerCenter platform components use TCP/IP to communicate. When you configure the PowerCenter Server and Repository Server, you specify TCP/IP port numbers that the PowerCenter Client tools use to establish connections.
- PowerCenter platform components use either ODBC or native connectivity to communicate with databases. This includes repository, source, target, lookup, and stored procedure databases.

For example, the PowerCenter Server writes session data to a DB2 target database on a machine separate from the PowerCenter Server machine. When you run the session, the PowerCenter Server reads the target database connectivity information from the target database connection stored in the repository. It uses this information to connect to the target database through the drivers included with the DB2 Client Application Enabler (CAE) installed on the PowerCenter Server machine. The PowerCenter Server performs all transactions with the target database through this client software.