PowerCenter Data Virtualization Edition

Deliver a Current, Complete, Trusted View of the Business within Days

Informatica PowerCenter Data Virtualization Edition enables business and IT to deliver a current, complete, and trusted view of the business – within days vs. months. It serves as a high-performance and secure agile data integration foundation for all integration projects. It includes all the capabilities of PowerCenter Standard Edition and adds features that increase productivity and agility. By leveraging this technology, the edition enables you to reuse skills and deliver new projects up to five times faster and at a third of the cost.

• Rapidly deliver new critical data and reports across applications and warehouses
• Access, merge, profile, transform, cleanse data in a web-based Analyst tool
• Collaborate with developers through a common repository and shared metadata
• Insulate consuming applications from change with a flexible, logical data model
• Deploy the same work seamlessly as virtual views or physical data integration

• The Forrester Wave: Data Virtualization Analyst Report

Informatica PowerCenter Data Virtualization Edition Key Features

Role-Based Tools that Share Common Metadata for Instant Collaboration

• A Web-based self-service analyst tool for analysts to define rules, profile data, and directly access the data they need, without IT intervention
• A powerful Eclipse-based development environment for IT to graphically discover, access, merge profile, transform, optimize, and deploy reusable data services
• A Web-based, global administration console designed for distributed environments that centralizes all administrative, security, operational, and service-monitoring tasks
• Reusable mapping templates for designing business/transformation logic in a modeling tool, such as Visio, and automatically generating data integration mappings
• A codeless, object-based, visual development environment that supplies built-in parallel processing transformations, a robust expression language, and extensible interfaces
• A comprehensive library of transformation objects for creating and extending context-independent, reusable integration objects
• An extensive expression library for expanding the existing set of predefined expressions and creating user-defined functions
• A robust visual debugger that speeds iterative development and minimizes error recovery logic for design and run-time environments

Integrated, Any-Stage Data Profiling of Federated Data

• Profiles federated data and integration logic at any stage, and document with valuable metadata
• Enables sharing of profiling results from data sources and integration logic with business users to ensure requirements are being met early and throughout the process

Integrated, On-the-Fly Data Quality on Federated Data

• Leverages pre-built native data quality rules (e.g., cleansing, enrichment, matching, and standardization) that can be reused across projects without rework
• Executes data quality rules as a service on the fly and in real time to federated data, without pre-processing, staging, or physically consolidating the data

Reusable Logical Data Objects

• Builds reusable logical data objects (LDO) based on business entities (e.g., CUSTOMER, PRODUCT, and ORDER) using an open, top-down and bottom-up model-based and metadata-driven approach
• Quickly delivers a standards-based data abstraction layer to insulate consuming applications from changes in underlying data sources

Single Environment for Data Integration and Data Federation

• Leverages a query-plan interface as well as numerous optimization and caching capabilities typically used in data federation
• Develops and reuses the same data integration logic for data federation, ETL, or Web services – instantly and without any rework

Integrated Data Federation

• Sources and combines data from multiple heterogeneous data sources into a single virtualized view in real-time, so that it appears as one data source to consuming applications
• Leverages a high-performance data federation engine, which supports advanced transformations including data quality in real-time along with sophisticated caching techniques, optimizations and security typically needed in data federation

Built-In Web Services Support

• Leverages Web services protocols, including XML, WSDL, and SOAP, REST to access data, metadata, and data integration workflows within an SOA
• Provides a Web services hub for centralized monitoring and reporting along-with built-in support for WS-Security, a built-in WSDL editor, and a Web services testing tool

Dynamically Scalable Data Services

• Enables existing batch and real-time data transformation logic to be exposed and reused as data services
• Automatically scales Web services to support a large number of concurrent workloads, typical of a shared services Integration Competency Center (ICC) environment

Universal Data Access

• Enables a single approach to accessing data in a wide variety of systems and formats
• Provides access to a wide variety of data systems and formats (when complemented by Informatica PowerExchange), including structured, unstructured, and semistructured data; relational data; mainframe data; file data; and standards-based data

Data Integration Services

• Accesses, transforms, and delivers data across the enterprise without generating code or having to hand-code data integration procedures
• Scales to support large volumes of data over multiple concurrent sessions

Global Metadata Services

• Defines, modifies, and enables reuse of data integration procedures by storing and managing data models, transformations, workflows, and other artifacts
• Integrates data by combining metadata-driven data integration logic with a high-performance transformation engine

Integration Workflows

• Manages and tracks the complex flow of data across transactional systems, databases, and other data sources through visual tools
• Provides a built-in, time- or event-based scheduler for automated, “lights-out” operation and for IT teams to schedule and execute data integration that doesn’t intrude on business operations

Centralized Data Security and Governance

• Creates policies and rules for data security, privacy, quality, and data freshness
• Centrally enforces and manages policies and rules across federated data for all data services in a single, unified environment

Reference Table Manager

• Provides an easy-to-use interface for business analysts and other subject matter experts to create, edit, and delete reference tables
• Creates an audit trail documenting the changes to the reference tables

Mapping Architect for Visio

• Automatically generates data integration mappings from best-practice templates and reverse-engineers existing mappings into reusable templates
• Accelerates and automates design using a data-flow design tool based on Microsoft Visio and mapping templates based on Informatica’s implementation methodology, Informatica Velocity

LDAP Integration

• Supports secure authentication of users and groups through an enterprise directory system
• Provides a choice between either Informatica PowerCenter or LDAP for authentication

Enterprise-Grade Security

• Provides granular privileges and flexible permissions management to ensure security, particularly across large, globally distributed teams
• Limits user access to only the minimal functionality and data they need, reducing the risk of potential security breaches