Monday, May 14, 2012

Informatica Glossary

Informatica is a tool used for the creation of ETL logic, job definition, and source control. It has a lot of proprietary terms that have similiar definitions outside the context of the application.  This is the start of a glossary for referncing these terms.

Mapping represents the flow and transformation of data from source to taraget.
Mapplet is a reuasable set of transformations that can be called from a mapping.
Session is a set of instructions that tells the Informatica Server how and when to move data from sources to targets. It is associated with a mapping to define the connections and other configurations for that mapping.
Workflow controls the execution of tasks such as commands, emails and sessions.
Worklet is a reuasable set of sessions that can be called within a workflow.

Although these are not Informatica specific, I am placing them here for want of a warehousing glossary post to add them to.

Factless Facts:Facts without any measures. This could be a table used to track batch processing status (e.g. job ran on date, where batch status is not normalized)
Additive Facts:a fact that leads to a meaningful measure when added (e.g. unit sold where the metric would be unit sold per week per sales representative).
Non-Additive Facts: Facts that do not lend themselves to a meaningful metric when added (e.g. unit price where unit price is a trend over time or an average across like products, but not added over time).
Semi-Additive Facts: when some but not all colums in a row can be used additively.
Accumulating Fact: Describes the grain of a fact. An accumulating fact stores a row for each stage in the lifetime of event (if that event reverts to a previous stage you can either update the previous stage record or add a new one with a rework flag).
Periodic Facts: Describes the grain of a fact. A periodic fact stores one row per event, so one row across multiple status changes for that event.
Derived Facts: Some BI data is not found in source. We create these facts by calculating them from other facts.

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