Informatica PowerCenter

Development Best Practices

Author:

D Radhakrishna Sarma
Singapore.

January 2, 2009

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR ............................................................................................................3 
ABSTRACT .............................................................................................................................3 
CONTENT OVERVIEW ...........................................................................................................3 
1.  LOOKUP - PERFORMANCE CONSIDERATIONS..........................................................3 
1.1.  UNWANTED COLUMNS .................................................................................................3 
1.2.  SIZE OF THE SOURCE VERSUS SIZE OF LOOKUP .............................................................3 
1.3.  JOIN INSTEAD OF LOOKUP ..........................................................................................4 
1.4.  CONDITIONAL CALL OF LOOKUP ....................................................................................4 
1.5.  SQL QUERY ...............................................................................................................4 
1.6.  INCREASE CACHE........................................................................................................4 
1.7.  CACHEFILE FILE-SYSTEM .............................................................................................4 
1.8.  USEFUL CACHE UTILITIES.............................................................................................5 
2.  WORKFLOW PERFORMANCE – BASIC CONSIDERATIONS ......................................5 
2.1.  SQL TUNING ..............................................................................................................6 
3.  PRE/POST-SESSION COMMAND - USES .....................................................................6 
4.  SEQUENCE GENERATOR – DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS ...........................................7 
5.  FTP CONNECTION OBJECT – PLATFORM INDEPENDENCE .....................................7 

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About the author
Radhakrishna Sarma is an ETL specialist in Credit Suisse bank in Singapore.
He has been developing ETL interfaces and working on databases, since
PowerCenter version 6.x. He is an active participant in the technical forums –
Informatica’s – TechNet and Oracle’s – OTN.

Abstract
This article explains a few of the important development best practices, like
lookups, workflow performance etc.

Content overview

• Lookup - Performance considerations

• Workflow performance – basic considerations
• Pre/Post-Session commands - Uses
• Sequence generator – design considerations
• FTP Connection object –platform independence

1. Lookup - Performance considerations

What is a lookup transformation? It is just not another transformation that
fetches you data to look up against source data. A Lookup is an important and
useful transformation when used effectively. If used improperly, performance
of your mapping will be severely impaired.

Let us see the different scenarios where you can face problems with Lookup
and also how to tackle them.

1.1. Unwanted columns

By default, when you create a lookup on a table, PowerCenter gives you all the
columns in the table. If not all the columns are required for the lookup
condition or return, delete the unwanted columns from the transformations.
By not removing the unwanted columns, the cache size will increase.

1.2. Size of the source versus size of lookup

Let us say, you have 10 rows in the source and one of the columns has to be
checked against a big table (1 million rows). Then PowerCenter builds the
cache for the lookup table and then checks the 10 source rows against the
cache. It takes more time to build the cache of 1 million rows than going to the
database 10 times and lookup against the table directly.

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Use uncached lookup instead of building the static cache, as the number of
source rows is quite less than that of the lookup.

1.3. JOIN instead of Lookup

In the same context as above, if the Lookup transformation is after the source
qualifier and there is no active transformation in-between, you can as well go
for the SQL over ride of source qualifier and join traditionally to the lookup
table using database joins, if both the tables are in the same database and
schema.

1.4. Conditional call of lookup

Instead of going for connected lookups with filters for a conditional lookup
call, go for unconnected lookup. Is the single column return bothering for
this? Go ahead and change the SQL override to concatenate the required
columns into one big column. Break them at the calling side into individual
columns again.

1.5. SQL query

Find the execution plan of the Lookup SQL and see if you can add some
indexes or hints to the query to make it fetch data faster. You may have to take
the help of a database developer to accomplish this if you, yourself are not a
SQLer.

1.6. Increase cache

If none of the above options provide performance enhancements, then the

problem may lie with the cache. The cache that you assigned for the lookup is
not sufficient to hold the data or index of the lookup. Whatever data that
doesn't fit into the cache is spilt into the cache files designated in
$PMCacheDir. When the PowerCenter doesn't find the data you are looking
for in the cache, it swaps the data from the file to the cache and keeps doing
this until the data is found. This is quite expensive being that this type of
operation is very I/O intense. To stop this issue from occurring, increase the
size of the cache so the entire data set resides in memory. When increasing the
cache you also have to be aware of the system constraints. If your cache size is
greater than the resources available, the session will fail due to the lack of
resources.

1.7. Cachefile file-system

In many cases, if you have cache directory in a different file-system than that
of the hosting server, the cache file piling up may take time and result in
latency. So with the help of your system administrator try to look into this
aspect as well.

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1.8. Useful cache utilities

If the same lookup SQL is being used by another lookup, then shared cache or
a reusable lookup should be used. Also, if you have a table where the data is
not changed often, you can use the persist cache option to build the cache
once and use it many times by consecutive flows.

2. Workflow performance – basic considerations

Though performance tuning has been the most feared part of development, it
is the easiest, if the intricacies are known. With the newer and newer versions
of PowerCenter, there is added flexibility for the developer to build better-
performing workflows. The major blocks for performance are the design of the
mapping, SQL tuning if databases are involved.

Regarding the design of the mapping, I have few basic considerations to be

made. Please note that these are not any rules-of-thumb, but will make you act
sensibly in different scenarios.

1. I would always suggest you to think twice before using an Update

Strategy, though it adds a certain level of flexibility in the mapping. If
you have a straight-through mapping which takes data from source and
directly inserts all the records into the target, you wouldn’t need an
update strategy.
2. Use a pre-SQL delete statement if you wish to delete specific rows from
target before loading into the target. Use truncate option in the session
properties, if you wish to clean the table before loading. I would avoid a
separate pipe-line in the mapping that runs before the load with
update-strategy transformation.
3. You have 3 sources and 3 targets with one-on-one mapping. If the load
is independent according to business requirement, I would create 3
different mappings and 3 different session instances and they all run in
parallel in my workflow after my “Start” task. I’ve observed that the
workflow runtime comes down between 30-60% of serial processing.
4. PowerCenter is built to work of high volumes of data. So let the server
be completely busy. Induce parallelism as far as possible into the
mapping/workflow.
5. If using a transformation like a Joiner or Aggregator transformation,
sort the data on the join keys or group by columns prior to these
transformations to decrease the processing time.
6. Filtering should be done at the database level instead within the
mapping. The database engine is much more efficient in filtering than
PowerCenter.

The above examples are just some things to consider when tuning a mapping.

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2.1. SQL tuning

SQL queries/actions occur in PowerCenter in one of the below ways.

• Relational Source Qualifier

• Lookup SQL Override
• Stored Procedures
• Relational Target

Using the execution plan to tune a query is the best way to gain an
understanding of how the database will process the data. Some things to keep
in mind when reading the execution plan include: "Full Table Scans are
not evil", "Indexes are not always fast", and “Indexes can be slow
too".

Analyse the table data to see if picking up 20 records out of 20 million is best
using index or using table scan. Fetching 10 records out of 15 using index is
faster or using full table scan is easier.

Many times the relational target indexes create performance problems when
loading records into the relational target. If the indexes are needed for other
purposes, it is suggested to drop the indexes at the time of loading and then
rebuild them in post-SQL. When dropping indexes on a target you should
consider integrity constraints and the time it takes to rebuild the index on post
load vs. actual load time.

3. Pre/Post-Session command - Uses

• It is a very good practice to email the success or failure status of a task,

once it is done. In the same way, when a business requirement drives,
make use of the Post Session Success and Failure email for proper
communication.
• The built-in feature offers more flexibility with Session Logs as
attachments and also provides other run-time data like Workflow run-
instance ID, etc.
• Any archiving activities around the source and target flat files can be
easily managed within the session using the session properties for flat
file command support that is new in PowerCenter v8.6. For example,
after writing the flat file target, you can setup a command to zip the file
to save space.
• If you have any editing of data in the target flat files which your
mapping couldn’t accommodate, write a shell/batch command or script
and call it in the Post-Session command task. I prefer taking trade-offs
between PowerCenter capabilities and the OS capabilities in these
scenarios.

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4. Sequence generator – design considerations
In most of the cases, I would advice you to avoid the use of sequence generator
transformation, while populating an ID column in the relational target table. I
suggest you rather create a sequence on the target database and enable the
trigger on that table to fetch the value from the database sequence.

There are many advantages to using a database sequence generator:

• Fewer PowerCenter objects will be present in a mapping which reduces

development time and also maintenance effort.
• ID generation is PowerCenter independent if a different application is
used in future to populate the target.
• Migration between environments is simplified because there is no
additional overhead of considering the persistent values of the
sequence generator from the repository database.

In all of the above cases, a sequence created in the target database would make
life lot easier for the table data maintenance and also for the PowerCenter
development. In fact, databases will have specific mechanisms (focused) to
deal with sequences and so you can implement manual Push-down
optimization on your PowerCenter mapping design for yourself.

DBAs will always complain about triggers on the databases, but I would still
insist on using sequence-trigger combination for huge volumes of data as well.

5. FTP Connection object – platform independence

If you have any files to be read as source from Windows server when your
PowerCenter server is hosted on UNIX/LINUX, then make use of FTP users
on the Windows server and use File Reader with FTP Connection object.

This connection object can be added as any other connection string. This gives
the flexibility of platform independence. This will further reduce the over-
head of having SAMBA mounts on to the Informatica boxes.

Disclaimer: The information provided in this document is offered for general

informational and educational purposes only. The views and opinions expressed in
this article are the author's own and may not reflect the views and opinions of Credit
Suisse.