Informatica PowerExchange: Oracle Real-Time Option

Todays IT organizations are faced with growing demand for timely access to critical operational data stored in Oracle-based transactional systems. New business initiatives, such as improving customer service, meeting governance and compliance requirements, consolidating systems or optimizing integration processes, present challenges to IT for finding an efficient, cost effective way to gain real-time data access without impacting existing applications. Until now, the most common approach has been one of two methodssource entire bulk data sets or hand code changecapture solutions that rely on application triggers and/or date stamps. Informatica PowerExchange for Oracle: Real-Time Option offers IT organizations using Oracle a non-invasive software based on a service-oriented architecture for capturing changes in real time or on a scheduled basis without requiring application programmingremoving implementation complexity, while reducing overall costs. Key Benefits of Informatica PowerExchange No additional triggers or timestamps required to existing applications Non-invasive architecture leverages Oracle LogMiners continuous mine capability Capture capabilities are at a granular table or column level allowing for fine grain control Changes are propagated using push or pull approaches Only committed, trusted data is moved Seamless management of rollback and recovery Seamless integration with the Informatica PowerCenter, EAI, and other data integration technologies

Figure 1: Informatica PowerExchange Product Architecture

The Informatica Approach

Informaticas patented, high performance change-capture architecture uniquely delivers the technology required by IT to fully leverage missioncritical data held in Oracle RDBMS technology while dramatically reducing the cost, complexity, and volume of data moving across the enterprise. PowerExchange for Oracle: Real-Time option, like Informatica PowerCenter and other Informatica products, is based on a metadata-driven engine that eliminates the expense and risk in writing code, and provides the flexibility required by the most demanding IT organizations to enable timely delivery of up-to-date information to applications, processes, and business people.

Technical Overview
Deploy without change to existing applicationsdue to the critical nature of Oracle RDBMS-based transactional applications, it is an operational imperative that no changes to the existing database structures (e.g., adding timestamps, status fields, and/or triggers) are required when implementing a change-capture technology. With PowerExchange, no changes are required to existing applications. PowerExchange interoperates seamlessly with Oracles change facility, LogMiner, as its source of transactional change. By operating off a log-based facility, installation, configuration, development, deployment, and maintenance of change-based data integration solutions are significantly simplified. Make data available on-demand to multiple subscriberschanges can be retrieved on a scheduled basis or streamed in continuous, real-time mode to support varying integration scenarios. Only committed data and control information, such as transaction type (e.g., insert, update, delete, etc.) and absolute timestamp are made available to change subscribers or consuming applications. Multiple subscribers can access changed data for different integration purposes through the same infrastructure to ensure broad use of strategic data from a single source. Manage errors and recover where processing left offone of the difficult issues when developing a change capture-based solutionwhether it is a hand-coded or product-based solutionis handling error recovery and intelligent session recovery upon a system, network, or software restart. Because recovery and restart are built into the architecture of PowerExchange, the need for programming and exception handling is eliminated. As transaction data is made available for downstream processing, PowerExchange logs time stamp synchronization tokens to ensure full recovery and roll-back in the event of a failure. Logging is done in memory and written to disk based on flexible commit points so that a balance can be achieved between maximum throughput and minimal roll-back time. A restart command then uses the token log to understand what data was made available to a downstream consumer. Move only committed, trusted datadata Integration is a difficult challenge without having the added complexity of managing transactional rollback boundaries. PowerExchange provides a Unit of Work cleanser capability that ensures that only committed transaction data is made available. This capability interfaces with Oracle LogMiner, monitoring commit points of the data elements registered for change. This streamlines overall development and removes unnecessary complexity.

2 of 4 Revision: 7/9/2004

Propagate changes using push or pulldata integration requires various methods of execution to support different technical or business requirements. In some instances, an architecture that supports a push model is needed to drive changed data into a message queue for downstream consumption. Other scenarios may require a pull of data by a data integration product, such as Informatica PowerCenter, for cleansing and transformation before being loaded into a target database. Both push and pull models are supported by PowerExchange, providing maximum deployment flexibility. Visual tools ease the configuration and management of change capturedeveloping change-capture solutions by hand is difficult and costly for even the most sophisticated IT organizations. LogMiner efficiently captures changed data but, if used directly, it requires hand coding to access, manage, and propagate changed data. Further coding is also needed to handle error recovery and scheduling, all of which are essential for end-toend processing of the captured changes. PowerExchange provides a graphical user interface, the PowerExchange Navigator, which allows users to configure extraction applications. Each application is represented as a visual metadata map comprised of the specific tables and/or columns involved in a change-capture scenario. Only those data elements required for a particular project are included in the metadata map which the Navigator uses to manage the set up and configuration of LogMiner for capturing those data elements. If errors occur in the capture process, the Navigator understands where to pick up in the transactional log to fully recover.

Figure 2: Selecting Specific Columns for Change Capture

With PowerExchange, graphical installation, implementation, and operation of end-to-end change-capture processes eliminate the traditional cost and time associated with developing, testing, and maintaining code. And it significantly reduces the burden of facilitating on-going change management in response to new business demands.

3 of 4 Revision: 7/9/2004

System Requirements
Oracle 9.2.0.3 or higher Oracle RAC supported with Oracle 10G and higher ARCHIVELOGGING mode enabled at a minimum of System for supplemental logging All data types supported except: Long, Long Raw, LOB Source operating systems: Windows 2000, XP, AIX 5.1 and above, Solaris 2.7 and above, HPUX 11 and above

WORLDWIDE HEADQUARTERS 2100 Seaport Boulevard Redwood City, CA 94063, USA Phone 650.385.5000 Fax 650.385.5500 Toll-free in the US 1.800.970.1179 www.informatica.com 2004 Informatica Corporation. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. Informatica, the Informatica logo, Turning integration into insight, PowerExchange, and PowerCenter are trademarks or registered trademarks of Informatica Corporation in the United States and in jurisdictions throughout the world. All other company and product names may be tradenames or trademarks of their respective owners. Part no. 6025 (07/04)

4 of 4 Revision: 7/9/2004