Informatica PowerCenter is a widely used extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) tool used in building enterprise data warehouses. The components within Informatica PowerCenter aid in extracting data from its source, transforming it as per business requirements and loading it into a target data warehouse. **Let us explore some of the essential concepts of Informatica and their usage 1. Data Warehousing It deals with the methodology of constructing a data warehouse. It includes: Analyzing business requirement ETL Development and Testing Report Development and Testing Database Design 2. Data Acquisition This process extracts the business information. It transforms data into required business process and loads it into the target system. Data Acquisition involves three steps: Data Extraction This process reads data from different source systems and thereby defines the extraction. ERP Source – SAP, Oracle, People Soft File Source – XML Files, Flat Files Legacy Source – Main frames, Cabal files Relational Source – Oracle, SQL Server. Data Transformation Transforms and cleanses data into desired business format. Below are some of such data transformation activities: Data Merging – This process integrates data from multiple source systems. Below are few types of data merging methods. Horizontal Merging – It merges the records horizontally. Vertical Merging – When different sources deal with the same ‘meta data’, then the method of merging is termed as Vertical Merging. Data Cleansing – It alters inconsistency and inaccuracy of data. This process removes the inefficient data before staging. Data Scrubbing – It derives latest attributes in a column. Data Aggregation – It calculates the summary amongst the detailed data. Data Loading It is the process of loading data into a target system. The types of data loading include: Initial Load – Extracts data from source and loads it directly into target system. Incremental Load – Extracts data from source system and loads it into destination system, later on updates the records into target system. 3. OLAP OLAP is a technology that recovers data from data warehouse and its interface. It creates a way among the user and database. DOLAP (Desktop OLAP) – It query data from desktop databases. HOLAP (Hybrid OLAP) – It is the integration of ROLAP and MOLAP. ROLAP (Relation OLAP) – It query data from relational sources. MOLAP (Multi OLAP) – It query data from multi-dimensional sources. List of Informatica Courses: Informatica Analyst Informatica PIM Informatica SRM Informatica MDM Informatica Data Quality Informatica ILM Informatica Big Data Edition Informatica Multi Domain MDM