Informatica PowerCenter (legacy) Reviews & Insights

Score7.9 out of 10

94 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Informatica PowerCenter are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Seamless data integration capabilities: Multiple reviewers have praised Informatica PowerCenter for its seamless data integration capabilities, with users stating that it effortlessly connects to multiple sources and targets. This feature simplifies the complex process of integrating data from various systems, providing a significant advantage in terms of efficiency and productivity.

User-friendly interface: The user-friendly interface of Informatica PowerCenter has been consistently appreciated by reviewers, who find it highly intuitive and easy to navigate. Users state that the application of complicated business rule logic is straightforward, thanks to the intuitive design process for creating ETL mappings and workflows. The minimal learning time and effort required to work with PowerCenter's interface are seen as significant advantages.

Reusability and streamlined development processes: Reviewers have highlighted PowerCenter's ability to capture and share logic in mapplets, enabling reusability and streamlining development processes. This feature contributes to a seamless workflow for developers, making the development and maintenance of code in PowerCenter straightforward. Users value this functionality as it enhances efficiency and promotes consistency across projects.

Informatica PowerCenter (legacy) Reviews

2 Reviews

Engineering

Old yet powerful ETL Tool

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

May 31, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used Informatica PowerCenter as an ETL to to feed data into Teradata Data Warehouse that houses all data marts of our company.
Mainly used to process semi-structured and unstructured data like web and mobile logs. It has been well tested against large volume of data and it stood up to the expectations.

Pros

Informatica Powercenter is an innovative software that works with ETL-type data integration. Connectivity to almost all the database systems.
Great documentation and customer support.
It has a various solution to address data quality issues. data masking, data virtualization. It has various supporting tools or MDM, IDQ, Analyst, BigData which can be used to analyze data and correct it.

Cons

It doesn't have much scheduling options and the tool is not very much capable if we schedule more jobs.
Debugging the workflows and mappings are very hard with Informatica PowerCenter.
Lookup transformation on large tables consumes more Memory and CPU.

Likelihood to Recommend

Informatica Powercenter is the centerpiece of our overall enterprise data warehouse strategy. It's a critical enablement to ensure we can feed in multiple data stream and transform them into digestible data within our data warehouse. With its flexible capabilities and API availability, we were able to feed in industry standard data format as well as home grown data structure. Overall, we are very pleased with their capability and contribution to our data warehouse strategy.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Internet company, 5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

PowerCenter works well with large, structured data files

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

March 31, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

PowerCenter is being used to automate our ETL processes. We have implemented data pipelines to ingest and transform data from our clients. PowerCenter work flows also load data into a DBMS platform and create SAS data libraries.

Pros

PowerCenter processes input files, performs specified transformations, and maps the input data format to the output data format very quickly. The PowerCenter backend implementation seems to be optimized to process and map structured input records to structured output records and load the records into a database. One of the strengths of PowerCenter is performance of processing petabytes of structured input data files.
PowerCenter does not require a software development experience or education. After providing initial hands-on training, the data consultants (who are statisticians, subject matter experts) in our organization were able to implement data ingest and data transformation tasks fairly easily.
PowerCenter supports multiple DBMS technologies (for example, Oracle, Netezza). This flexibility allows it to be used by multiple departments within our organization.

Cons

One of the challenges of PowerCenter is the lack of integration between the components and functionality provided by PowerCenter. PowerCenter consists of multiple components such has the repository service, integration service, metadata service. Considerable time and resources were required to install and configure these components before PowerCenter was available for use.
In order to connect to various data sources such as Netezza database or SAS datasets, PowerCenter requires the installation and configuration of separate plug-ins. We spent considerable time trouble-shooting and debugging problems while trying to get the various plug-ins integrated with PowerCenter and get them up and running as described in the documentation.
PowerCenter works well with structured data. That is, it is easy to work with input and output data that is pre-defined, fixed, and unchanging. It is much more difficult to work with dynamic data in which new fields are added or removed ad-hoc or if data format changes during the data ingest process. We have not been as successful in using PowerCenter for dynamic data.
One of the challenges of learning PowerCenter is that it is difficult to find documentation or publications that help you learn the various details about PowerCenter software. Unlike SAS Institute, Informatica does not publish books about PowerCenter. The documentation available with PowerCenter is sparse; we have learned many aspects of this technology through trial and error.

Likelihood to Recommend

PowerCenter is well suited for processing of large amounts of data that is structured and pre-defined. It is well-suited for large organizations that have the resources to install, configure and support PowerCenter. It is well suited for large organizations that have a large number of data consultants/analysts that do not have a software development/programming background.

PowerCenter is not a good fit for smaller, agile organizations that work with unstructured data and changing/dynamic data.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Insurance company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience