Informatica Server

Informatica server is for processing the ETL jobs. It can run in any machine on the network. You do not need to run it on the same machine that you run Informatica Workflow Client or on the machine that you run the RDBMS.

You need to install the Informatica server component on the host machine to run the Informatica server. You need to directly login to the machine where the Informatica server will run in order to start the Informatica Server process. To configure the Informatica server process, you run the Informatica Server setup tool in the host machine. You need to enter a server name, the IP address, and the repository information. It appears that each Informatica server process can only run for a single repository. The rest of information in the Informatica Server Setup have defaults or are optional. Once you enter the Informatica server process information, you can start the server from the Control Panel of the host machine.

I also noticed that in the host machine, you can only run one Informatica Server. This is because the informatica server is run as a window service on the Windows platform. On unix, you can create an
unique pmserver.cfg for each server and then use the pmserver command with the config file to start multiple servers.

After you finished the configuration on the host machine, you also need to register the Informatica server process with the repository. This is done in the Informatica Workflow Manager client from any machine that you add the target repository to the client. You first login to the repository and go to the menu item Server -> Server Configuration. The server name needs to match the server name entered in the Informatica Server Setup tool on the host machine. The IP address needs to match the IP entered on the server. It is possible that a machine may have multiple IP addresses. You choose an IP address to run the Informatica server and register the server with the repository. The repository to Informatica server are bi-direction linked. You need to enter the correct information on both sides.

Each Informatica repository may be associated with multiple Informatica server processes. Each server can only run the ETL process for a single repository.

You can change the locations of the server files remotely from the Workflow Manager client tool. However the parameter file need to be created or updated directly on the file system accessible from machine running the Informatica server. The parameter can determine the database connection to be used for a workflow and for the targets and sources of a session.

For example, the following attributes are pre-populated for a Informatica Server

$PMRootDir = C:\Program Files\Informatica PowerCenter 7.1.4\server
$PMSourceFileDir = $PMRootDir/SrcFiles

If you are using the Oracle BI Applications, the Informatica server expects the parameter file exists in the directory $PMSourceFileDir. To run the workflow directly, not from DAC, you will need to override the Parameter Filename or create a parameter file with the expected name in the directory.

New Update – May 30, 2008

As of Oracle BI Application 7.9.5, we now use Informatica PowerCenter 8.1.1. Informatica PowerCenter 8 does not use “Informatica server” any more. They now use “Integration Service”.

Please see Informatica PowerCenter 8 terminologies.