Question:
Hi Folks,
Has anyone worked with Informatica's ETL tools to extract data from external source systems into BW? I will appreciate if you can detail me the procedures and prerequisites required? We are on 3.0b. Course materials talk about Ascential and not about Informatica. I will appreciate your immediate reply.
Thanks.
Som
Answer:
hi Som,
we are using Informatica with BW 2.1c (should be the same as BW 3 from the informatica view)
Besides Informatica PowerCenter you will need PowerConnect for BW.
After defining your source- and target-systems you will use the Inform. Designer to create Mappings (i.e. transformations and so on between your source DB and your target BW). Then you will create a Workflow containing this mapping. The workflowname is what you enter as "3rd party ..." in your InfoPackage. Of course the Inform. Server has to be registered at the BWsystem and needs to be a DataSource... Now you can start the InfoPackage an Inform. will do the rest for you
With PowerConnect Ver. 6.2 Informatica delivers some BW-Solutions to trigger the Infopackage this is what we are using and it works quit well.
HTH,
Alex
Answer:
BW provides DBConnect, why use Informatica to connect to external sources?
Answer:
we are using Informatica with BW 2.1c (should be the same as BW 3 from the informatica view)
Besides Informatica PowerCenter you will need PowerConnect for BW.
Hi Alex and everybody,
We are just deciding to use Informatica or not. Did you have any problems using Informatica? Or it works so easy as the white papers state? Just "plug-and-play" and it works?
Thx,
Feri
Answer:
Hi Feri,
once the configuration is done (define Inform. as Source in BW, create BW-Connections on Inform.-Server etc.) it runs quite smooth. Though there are still many little sources of errors that can give you a hard time. Performance tuning with Inform. is a trial and error process -- Inform. defaults create IDOCs with 200-300 rows per IDOC when loading data....
Besides:
BW provides DBConnect, why use Informatica to connect to external sources?
We are using Informatica since BW 1.2-times, where there was no DB-Connect.
HTH a little and I'm not too late with my reply
Alex
Answer:
Hi Alex,
Thanks for the answer!
Since than we almost decided to use Informatica. So if we calculate your answer also, then I am sure we will.
Performance tuning with Inform. is a trial and error process -- Inform. defaults create IDOCs with 200-300 rows per IDOC when loading data....
Could you explain this a little bit more? We plan to load about 2million records/day through informatica, so good performance is essential.
Thanks,
Feri
Answer:
Hello Feri,
let me quote the informatica PowerConnect for BW-manual:
Performance enhancement for loading into SAP BW
If you see a performance slowdown for sessions that load into SAP BW, set the default buffer block size to 15-20 MB to enhance performance. You can put 5-10,000 rows per block, so you can calculate the buffer block size needed with the following formula:
Row size * Rows per block = Default Buffer Block size
For example, if your target row size is 2 KB: 2 KB * 10,000 = 20 MB.
The 'Default Buffer Block size' determines how many records a data package(BW: AWB-> Monitor -> Details) will have. The default parameter value from informatica was 64 KB, which resulted in a hugh number of data packages in BW on our first test-load. And we experienced that BW takes really long to handle that amount of data packages.... The only help from informatica we got, was the information that there are a lot of parameters to affect performance and we should try to change them all.
Well, that's the story behind my comment. It's about two years ago, maybe they have gathered a little more experience in the mean time.
Bye,
Alex