Explain your Project? What are your Daily routines?

My daily routine is to refer the Mapping document and build mappings orchange mappings based on the business requirement. Apart from this I used tocheck the running workflows in DAC There are few problems you may face routinely at daily.

1) Session failed but unable to open session log file. Possible reason: Missing parameter/Variable Solution: Go to workflow log and Check for paramter/variable value which is missing. Add missing value then rerun. 2) Data base error ...Table or View doesn't exist. If any relational object(Source/target ) is not found at DB level, You weill be getting this error. Solution :- Make sure object is available at DB. 3) Data base error ....Invalid Identifier... Reason:- Column is missing at DB level Add missing filed at DB level or delete it at PC level. 4) Data base error ....Cannot insert null into ............ Reason:- Not Null or PK is defined on target table and there is null value trying to insert into that field. 5) Data base error ...unique constraint voilated Reason:- PK is defined on target table and row is already present with the same value which you are tying to load again.

you can take unique rows from source or Reject duplicates to load into same table again. 6) Data base error ..........TNS Listner not found. Reason:- 1) TNS entry may be missing. 2) Oracle DB server might be down. 7) Source field in inbound. contact admin support or data type mismatch. Reason:- If you have SQ override query and field names used in query and projected to next transformation differs. When order of ports under ports tab is not same as select query fileds How many mapping have you created all together in your project?

Explain your project?I worked for stryker endoscopy, where the main of the project was to pull thedata from stryker pulse to a centralized data warehouse. We are usinginformatica 8.6 to extract, transform and load the data into datawarehouse.

In which account does your Project Fall? What is your Reporting Hierarchy? How many Complex Mappings have you created? Could you please me the situation for which you have developed that Complex mapping? What is your Involvement in Performance tuning of your Project? What is the Schema of your Project? And why did you opt for that particular schema? What are your Roles in this project? Can I have one situation which you have adopted by which performance has improved dramatically? Where you Involved in more than two projects simultaneously? Do you have any experience in the Production support? What kinds of Testing have you done on your Project (Unit or Integration or System or UAT)? And Enhancements were done after testing?

How many Dimension Table are there in your Project and how are they linked to the fact table? How do we do the Fact Load? How did you implement CDC in your project? How does your Mapping in File to Load look like? How does your Mapping in Load to Stage look like? How does your Mapping in Stage to ODS look like? What is the size of your Data warehouse? What is your Daily feed size and weekly feed size? Which Approach (Top down or Bottom Up) was used in building your project? How do you access your sources (are they Flat files or Relational)? Have you developed any Stored Procedure or triggers in this project? How did you use them and in which situation? Did your Project go live? What are the issues that you have faced while moving your project from the Test Environment to the Production Environment? What is the biggest Challenge that you encountered in this project? What is the scheduler tool you have used in this project? How did you schedule jobs using it? Difference between Informatica 7x and 8x? Difference between connected and unconnected lookup transformation in Informatica? Difference between stop and abort in Informatica? Difference between Static and Dynamic caches? What is Persistent Lookup cache? What is its significance? Difference between and reusable transformation and mapplet? How the Informatica server sorts the string values in Rank transformation? Is sorter an active or passive transformation? When do we consider it to be active and passive?

Explain about Informatica server Architecture? In update strategy Relational table or flat file which gives us more performance? Why? What are the out put files that the Informatica server creates during running a session? Can you explain what are error tables in Informatica are and how we do error handling in Informatica? Difference between constraint base loading and target load plan? Difference between IIF and DECODE function? How to import oracle sequence into Informatica? What is parameter file? Difference between Normal load and Bulk load? How u will create header and footer in target using Informatica? What are the session parameters? Where does Informatica store rejected data? How do we view them? What is difference between partitioning of relational target and file targets? What are mapping parameters and variables in which situation we can use them? What do you mean by direct loading and Indirect loading in session properties? How do we implement recovery strategy while running concurrent batches? Explain the versioning concept in Informatica?

26.What is Data driven?

27.What is batch? Explain the types of the batches?

28.What are the types of meta data repository stores?

29.Can you use the mapping parameters or variables created in one mapping into another mapping?

30.Why did we use stored procedure in our ETL Application?

31.When we can join tables at the Source qualifier itself, why do we go for joiner transformation?

32.What is the default join operation performed by the look up transformation?

33.What is hash table Informatica?

34.In a joiner transformation, you should specify the table with lesser rows as the master table. Why?

35.Difference between Cached lookup and Un-cached lookup?

36.Explain what DTM does when you start a work flow?

37.Explain what Load Manager does when you start a work flow?

38.In a Sequential batch how do i stop one particular session from running?

39.What are the types of the aggregations available in Informatica?

40.How do I create Indexes after the load process is done?

41.How do we improve the performance of the aggregator transformation?

42.What are the different types of the caches available in Informatica? Explain in detail?

43.What is polling?

44.What are the limitations of the joiner transformation?

45.What is Mapplet?

46.What are active and passive transformations?

47.What are the options in the target session of update strategy transformation?

48.What is a code page? Explain the types of the code pages?

49.What do you mean rank cache?

50.How can you delete duplicate rows with out using Dynamic Lookup? Tell me any other ways using lookup delete the duplicate rows?

51.Can u copy the session in to a different folder or repository?

52.What is tracing level and what are its types?

53.What is a command that used to run a batch?

54.What are the unsupported repository objects for a mapplet?

55.If your workflow is running slow, what is your approach towards performance tuning?

56.What are the types of mapping wizards available in Informatica?

57.After dragging the ports of three sources (Sql server, oracle, Informix) to a single source qualifier, can we map these three ports directly to target?

58.Why we use stored procedure transformation?

59.Which object is required by the debugger to create a valid debug session?

60.Can we use an active transformation after update strategy transformation?

61.Explain how we set the update strategy transformation at the mapping level and at the session level?

62.What is exact use of 'Online' and 'Offline' server connect Options while defining Work flow in Work flow monitor? The system hangs when 'Online' Server connect option. The Informatica is installed on a Personal laptop.

63.What is change data capture?

64.Write a session parameter file which will change the source and targets for every session. i.e different source and targets for each session run ?

65.What are partition points?

66.What are the different threads in DTM process?

67.Can we do ranking on two ports? If yes explain how?

68.What is Transformation?

69.What does stored procedure transformation do in special as compared to other transformation?

70.How do you recognize whether the newly added rows got inserted or updated?

71.What is data cleansing?

72.My flat files size is 400 MB and I want to see the data inside the FF with out opening it? How do I do that?

73.Difference between Filter and Router?

74.How do you handle the decimal places when you are importing the flat file?

75.What is the difference between $ & $$ in mapping or parameter file? In which case they are generally used? 76.While importing the relational source definition from database, what are the meta data of source U import?

77.Difference between Power mart & Power Center?

78.What kinds of sources and of targets can be used in Informatica?

79.If a sequence generator (with increment of 1) is connected to (say) 3 targets and each target uses the NEXTVAL port, what value will each target get?

80.What do you mean by SQL override?

81.What is a shortcut in Informatica?

82.How does Informatica do variable initialization? Number/String/Date

83.How many different locks are available for repository objects

84.What are the transformations that use cache for performance?

85.What is the use of Forward/Reject rows in Mapping?

86.How many ways you can filter the records?

87.How to delete duplicate records from source database/Flat Files? Can we use post sql to delete these records. In case of flat file, how can you delete duplicates before it starts loading?

88.You are required to perform bulk loading using Informatica on Oracle, what action would perform at Informatica + Oracle level for a successful load?

89.What precautions do you need take when you use reusable Sequence generator transformation for concurrent sessions?

90.Is it possible negative increment in Sequence Generator? If yes, how would you accomplish it?

91.Which directory Informatica looks for parameter file and what happens if it is missing when start the session? Does session stop after it starts?

92.Informatica is complaining about the server could not be reached? What steps would you take?

93.You have more five mappings use the same lookup. How can you manage the lookup?

94.What will happen if you copy the mapping from one repository to another repository and if there is no identical source?

95.How can you limit number of running sessions in a workflow?

96.An Aggregate transformation has 4 ports (l sum (col 1), group by col 2, col3), which port should be the output?

97.What is a dynamic lookup and what is the significance of NewLookupRow? How will use them for rejecting duplicate records?

98.If you have more than one pipeline in your mapping how will change the order of load?

99.When you export a workflow from Repository Manager, what does this xml contain? Workflow only?

100. Your session failed and when you try to open a log file, it complains that the session details are not available. How would do trace the error? What log file would you seek for?

101.You want to attach a file as an email attachment from a particular directory using email task in Informatica, How will you do it?

102. You have a requirement to alert you of any long running sessions in your workflow. How can you create a workflow that will send you email for sessions running more than 30 minutes. You can use any method, shell script, procedure or Informatica mapping or workflow control? Informatica Interview Questions II Posted by Sunil under Informatica 1 Comment 1. What were your responsibilities in your last project?

I was responsible for designing the data warehouse, identifying all

source systems, analyzing the source in terms quality, designing the staging area with cleaning, involved in the 4 step data warehouse process, dimensional database modeling, etc.

2. Did you lead the Design phase? What tasks did you do? What are the documents that you give during the Design phase?

3.

What are the steps you do after a mapping is developed?

4.

What have you done on performance tuning?

5. Yes

Have you used Unix before? Which shell did you use?

6.

How do you kick off your jobs in Informatica?

By writing scheduling unix jobs to call Informatica work flows, also worked with Auto sys and windows services in windows machines.

7. What are the different types of testing you do once the mappings are developed? Unit testing

8. What were the most complex mappings that you had developed? Mapping involves multiple data stream coming as XML, TEXT files and relational files in different formats, which needed to normalize it and make it uniform in the staging area before loading to the target system.

9.

What type of data did your DB hold? Explain the business

perspective of your last project. Millions.

10. What type of data models were you loading? 3rd NF or Star Schema I have used ETL tools to load to both normalized OLTP systems, Staging area but in most of the data warehouse applications I used ETL to load to star schema dimensional databases.

11. Which version of Informatica did you use in your project? Have you touched Informatica 7.0? What did you develop in Informatica 7.0? I have worked on Informatica 7.0 and 6.0

12. You have to load master table first and child table next in order to avoid referential integrity, how to go about it. If you have specified referential integrity constraint at database level, you must load the must load the master table/dimensions before loading to the detail/fact tables.

13. Joiner Transformation. You can use the Joiner transformation to join source data from two related sources residing in different locations or file systems. Or, you can join data from the same source.

14. What are the different types of source systems you have used. What type of Target DBs did you use? I have used TEXT files, XML files, MS Access and relational databases.

15. What box you used in your system

Solaris, HP-UX 10.20, Windows Servers.

16. How to eliminate the duplicate values from the source. How do you use the Source Qualifier to do that? If you use flat files as source, how do you do that? Use Distinct in source qualifier. Use aggregator transformation and use group using all columns.

17. How to filter unnecessary records? Is it better to use Source Qualifier to filter out unwanted rows than a Filter transformation? Why? It is better to use source qualifier to filter out unwanted rows to avoid bringing all the rows to the mapping from the source. Use SQL Override to filter out using WHERE clause.

18. In aggregator transformation what will happen if group by clause is not used It uses all rows.

19. Why do you use a Lookup? Use look up to find related information from relational tables or text files.

20. Difference between unconnected and connected lookup Unconnected look up gets input from :LKP expression of other transformation but connected look up gets input from the pipeline.

21. Have you used cached lookups? When would you use it? What are the differences between named and unnamed cache?

22. Sequence generator

Sequence generator, generates auto numbers for surrogate keys.

23. How we go about insert or update in the mapping Use update strategy transformations.

24. How do you find out if a lookup condition fails? It r 25. How many values unconnected lookup will return One.

26. What is debugger? Have you used the debugger? What do the breakpoints do in the debugger?

27. What is worklet Reusable work flows without scheduling information, a workflow needs to be created to worklet to get executed.

28. What is named cache and unnamed cache 29. What is the difference between router and filter Router will route based on one or more conditions but filter will filter out based on condition.

30. Expalin the DW architecture followed in he last project.

31. What is the purpose of the parameter file and give example. Have you used parameters within a session? Give examples.

32. What is the usage of workflow and worklet.

33. What is the usage of maplet. Have you used them?

34. Can you call a Source Qualifier within a mapplet?

35. What are the different type of dimensions have you used? and where ?

36. In a Star Schema, were you loading Fact & Dimension tables? What type of Dimension tables did you use Type 1 or Type 2?

37. Can you walk me through a high level mapping to load a Type 2 Dimension table?

38. Have you ever loaded a mapping to maintain history? What was your source for your history table?

39. What are the transformations you use to load history into a history table?

40. When do you insert a new row in the history table? After some days or months, some details changes and how are the changed rows loaded? Will you insert the row or update the existing row in the table? (Basically, he is trying to find out the kind of SCD used). 41. How and where have you used the incremental load?

42. You are ready to execute a mapping. What are the objects that should be available to execute it? What do you do to execute a

mapping?

43. How do you make a series of mappings run together? You need to run more than one mapping that are not related. How do you do that?

44. How do you create Surrogate keys using Informatica? Have you loaded surrogate keys?

45. When would you cache a sequence generator?

46. What are the transformations you have used?

47. What are properties you set for a persistent look up cache?

48. What are the diff between static and dynamic look up cache?

49. What are parameter files? why do you use them?

50. What are active transformations?

51. Describe SCD?

52. Have you used Type 2 dimensions.

53. Give an example of type 2 dimensions.

54. What are the session properties? What is the diff between Insert as Insert and update as update in a load mapping?

55. What are the diff between filter and router?

56. Did you use aggregator? What are the properties you set?

57. How do you skip the 1st row of a flat file being used as a target?

58. When do you set the property Treat rows as Data Driven?

59. How would you run a mapping?

60. What are the components of a mapping?

61. What are mapplets?

62. What are worklets?

63. When you use flat file as a target what are the properties you set at the target level?

64. What property you set for update strategies?