Informatica 1. Transformations: in informatica a transformation helps to transform the source data according to the requirement of the target system.

It also ensures the quality of data that is being loaded. There are two types of transformations: active and passive. Active: an active transformation can change the number of rows that can pass through it i.e. it can delete or eliminate the rows that do not meet the conditions in transformation. Passive: a passive transformation does not change the number of rows that pass through it i.e. it allows all rows through the transformation. Transformations can be connected or unconnected. Connected transformation is connected to other transformations or directly to the target table in the mapping. Unconnected transformation is not connected to other transformations in the mapping. It is called within another transformation, and returns a value to that transformation. List of Transformations in informatica: Aggregator transformation. Expression transformation. Filter transformation. Joiner transformation. Lookup transformation. Normalizer transformation. Rank transformation. Router transformation. Sequence generator transformation. Stored procedure transformation. Sorter transformation. Update strategy transformation. XML source qualifier transformation. Advanced external procedure transformation. External transformation.

Aggregator Transformation: Its an active and connected transformation. Useful to perform calculations such as averages and sums (mainly to perform calculations on multiple rows or groups). Eg: total of monthly or yearly sales. Aggregate functions such as AVG, FIRST, COUNT, PERCENTILE, MAX, SUM can be used.

Expression Transformation: Its passive and connected transformation. It can be used to calculate values in a single row before writing to the target. Eg: converting date to string, concatenating first and second names. Filter Transformation: Its an active and connected transformation. It can be used to filter rows in a mapping that do not meet the condition. Eg: grouping employees who belong to a particular department. Joiner Transformation: Its an active and connected transformation. It can be used to join two sources coming from two different locations or same location. Eg: joining two flat files, joining a relational source and XML source. In order to join two sources there must be at least one matching port. It is must to specify one source as master and other as detail when joining two sources. Joiner supports the following types of joins: Normal Master outer Detail outer Full outer Normal join discards all the rows of data from the master and detail source that do not match, based on the condition. Master outer join discards all the unmatched rows from the master source and keeps all the rows from the detail source and the matching rows from the master source. Detail outer join keeps all rows of the data from the master source and the matching rows from the detail source. It discards the unmatched rows from the detail source. Full outer join keeps all rows of data from both master and detail. Lookup Transformation: Its passive. It can be both connected and unconnected as well. Its used to lookup data in a relational, view or synonym. Lookup definition can be imported either from source or target tables. Eg: retrieving the sales of a product with particular ID assuming that sales data reside in another table. In this case we can use lookup transformation to lookup the data for the product with that ID in sales table. Connected lookup receives input values directly from the mapping pipeline whereas unconnected lookup receives input from LKP expression from another transformation.

Connected lookup returns multiple columns from the same row whereas unconnected lookup has one return port and returns one column from each row. Connected lookup supports user defined values whereas unconnected lookup does not support user defined values. Normalizer Transformation: Its an active and connected transformation. Its mainly used with COBOL sources where most of the times data is stored in denormalized format. It can also be used to create multiple rows of data from a single row of data. Rank Transformation: Its active and connected. It is used to select the top or bottom rank of data. Eg: to select 10 regions where the sales volume was very high or 10 lowest price products. Router Transformation: It is an active and connected transformation. It is similar to the filter transformation. The only difference is, filter drops the data that do not meet the condition whereas router has option to capture the data that do not meet the condition. It is useful to test multiple conditions. It has input, output and default groups. Eg: to filter data where state=TN, state=AP etc. it is easy to route data to different tables. Sequence generator Transformation: It is a passive and connected transformation. It is used to create unique primary key values or cycle through a sequential range of numbers to replace missing keys. It has two output ports to connect transformations. By default it has two fields CURRVAL and NEXTVAL (we cannot add ports to this transformation). NEXTVAL generates a sequence of number by connecting it to a transformation or target. CURRVAL is the NEXTVAL plus one or the NEXTVAL plus the increment by value. Stored procedure Transformation: It is passive and connected & unconnected. It is useful to automate time-consuming tasks and it is also used in error handling, to drop and recreate indexes and to determine the space in database, a specialized calculation etc. The stored procedure must exist in the database before creating a stored procedure transformation, and the stored procedure can exist in a source, target, or any database with a valid connection to the informatica server.

A stored procedure is an executable script with SQL statements and control statements, user-defined variables and conditional statements. Sorter Transformation: It is a connected and an active transformation. It allows sorting data either in ascending or descending order according to a specified field. Also used to configure for case-sensitive sorting, and specify whether the output rows should be distinct. Source qualifier Transformation: It is an active and connected transformation. When adding a relational or flat file to source definition to a mapping, it is must to connect it to a source qualifier transformation. It performs various tasks such as overriding default SQL query, filtering records; join data from two or more tables etc. Update strategy Transformation: It is active and connected. It is used to update data in a target table, either to maintain history of data or recent changes. You can specify how to treat source rows in table, insert, update, delete or data driven. XML source qualifier Transformation: It is passive and connected. It is used only with an XML source definition. It represents the data elements that the informatica server reads when it executes a session with XML sources. Advanced external procedure Transformation: It is active and connected. It operates in conjunction with procedures, which are created outside of the designer to extend PowerCenter/PowerMart functionality. It is useful in creating external transformation applications, such as sorting and aggregation, which require all input rows to be processed before emitting any output rows. External procedure Transformation: It is active and connected/unconnected. Sometimes the standard transformations such as expression transformation may not provide the functionality that you want. In such cases external procedure is useful to develop complex functions within a dynamic link library(DLL) or UNIX shared library, instead of creating the necessary expression transformations in a mapping.

External procedure returns a single value, whereas advanced external procedure returns multiple values.External procedure supports COM and informatica procedures, whereas AEP supports only informatica procedures.