Informatica Grid

jking123 · Post by **jking123** » Wed Jul 18, 2007 9:25 am

I have been hearing about Informatica Grid recently as an alterantive to Ab Initio and EE. Anyone here have any working experience with it. I have used all 3 tools but have never used the Grid version of Informatica.

ray.wurlod · Post by **ray.wurlod** » Wed Jul 18, 2007 3:11 pm

No experience with Informatica Grid, but there are quite a few sites happily running DataStage Enterprise Edition on a grid. The main thing you need is a dynamic configuration file - which IBM sells a service to create for you.

vmcburney · Post by **vmcburney** » Wed Jul 18, 2007 8:37 pm

I don't know much about it but the challenge for Informatica is that Ab Initio and DataStage EE were built from the ground up as shared nothing parallel processing engines. It's hard to take a product that is single threaded and build that into it - which is why Ascential stopped trying with Server Edition and bought Orchestrate and turned it into DataStage parallel jobs. With the Information Server IBM have put almost everything in the suite onto the parallel engine including data quality and profiling. A lot of ETL tools now claim to have parallel processing but I wonder which of them do it well.

lstsaur · Post by **lstsaur** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 12:12 am

Hi,
Grid computing is a low cost solution that provides for high throughput processing. Most grid installations consist of 4 or more low cost Intel servers running RedHat or SuSe Linux. Resource Management software determines which servers to use to run your jobs.

So, it doesn't matter is Informatic Grid or DataStage EE Grid, as a developer you don't need to worry about the configurations of grid. You design and code your jobs as the same way as you do in non-grid environment.

JoshGeorge · Post by **JoshGeorge** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 2:55 am

It is always a good thing to be aware of grid environment as a developer. Dynamic cofiguration file concept and additional APT parameters are some of the 'musts'.

lstsaur wrote: So, it doesn't matter is Informatic Grid or DataStage EE Grid, as a developer you don't need to worry about the configurations of grid. You design and code your jobs as the same way as you do in non-grid environment.

ray.wurlod · Post by **ray.wurlod** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 3:20 pm

One customer is running on a grid of 400 Linux machines. DataStage EE is totally scalable. They're very happy with it, not least with the low hardware cost.

kumar_s · Post by **kumar_s** » Mon Jul 23, 2007 10:25 pm

Vincent, I was under the impression that Ascential was the first to bring up the Prallel operation (orchestrate) before Informatinca

Was it the other way?

vmcburney · Post by **vmcburney** » Mon Jul 23, 2007 11:46 pm

Ab Initio had the first massively parallel ETL tool, Orchestrate was one of the next to do it and were acquired by Ascential, Informatica grid came later.

kumar_s · Post by **kumar_s** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 6:04 am

Thats a peice of good information.