New features of Informatica 8

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I have summarized the whole content as follows:

The following summarizes changes to PowerCenter domains that might affect

upgrades to PowerCenter 8

*Object Permissions*
Effective in version 8.1.1, you can assign object permissions to users when
you add a user account, set user permissions, or edit an object.

*Gateway and Logging Configuration*

Effective in version 8.1, you configure the gateway node and location for
log event files on the Properties tab for the domain. Log events describe
operations and error messages for core and application services, workflows
and sessions.
Log Manager runs on the master gateway node in a domain.
We can configure the maximum size of logs for automatic purge in megabytes.
Powercenter 8.1 also provides enhancements to the Log Viewer and log event
formatting.

*Unicode compliance*
Effective in version 8.1, all fields in the Administration Console accept
Unicode characters. One can choose UTF-8 character set as the repository
code page to store multiple languages.

*Memory and CPU Resource Usage*

You may notice an increase in memory and CPU resource usage on machines
running PowerCenter Services.

*Domain Configuration Database*

PowerCenter stores the domain configuration in a database.

*License Usage*
Effective in version 8.0, the Service Manager registers license information.
*High Availability*
High availability is the PowerCenter option that eliminates a single point
of failure in the PowerCenter environment and provides minimal service
interruption in the event of failure. High availability provides the
following functionality:
*Resilience. *Resilience is the ability for services to tolerate transient
failures, such as loss of connectivity to the database or network failures.
*Failover. *Failover is the migration of a service process or task to
another node when the node running the service process becomes unavailable.
*Recovery. *Recovery is the automatic or manual completion of tasks after an
application service is interrupted.
* *
*Web services for Administration*
The Administration Console is a browser-based utility that enables you to
view domain properties and perform basic domain administration tasks, such
as adding domain users, deleting nodes, and creating services.

*Repository Security*
Effective in version 8.1, PowerCenter uses a more robust encryption
algorithm.
Also provides advanced purges for purging obsolete versions of repository
objects.

*Partitioning*
There is database partitioning available. Apart from this we can configure
dynamic partitioning based on nodes in a grid, the number of partitions in
the source table and the number of partitions option. The session creates
additional partitions and attributes at the run time.

*Recovery*
The recovery of workflow, session and task are more robust now. The state of
the workflow/session is now stored in the shared file system and not in
memory.

*FTP*
We have options to have partitioned FTP targets and Indirect FTP file
source(with file list).

*Performance*
Pushdown optimization
Uses increased performance by pushing transformation logic to the database
by analyzing the transformations and issuing SQL statements to sources and
targets. Only processes any transformation logic that it cannot push to the
database.

*Flat file performance*

We can create more efficient data conversion using the new version.
We can concurrently write to multiple files in a session with partitioned
targets.
One can specify a command for source or target file in a session. The
command can be to create a source file like 'cat a file'.
Append to flat file target option is available now.

*Pmcmd/infacmd*
New features added to pmcmd. We can use infacmd to administer Powercenter
domains.
Infasetup program to setup domain and node properties.

*Mappings *
We can now build custom transformation enhancements in API using c++ and
Java code.
We can use partition threads to specific custom transformations with
partition enhancements.

New Java transformation is added which provides simple native programming

interface to define transformation with Java language.

User defined functions similar to macros in Excel files. Some new functions
are added such as COMPRESS, DECOMPRESS, AES_ENCRYPT, AES_DECRYPT, IN,
GREATEST, LEAST, PMT, RATE, RAND etc.