Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Working with connection objects
At this stage, you must be aware that we will need to define the database connections in
Workflow Manager before we can define the connection in the workflow. Defining the con-
nection is necessary in order to make the data flow from the actual database table to In-
formatica.
If we use
File
for
Source
or
Target
, we need to define the path location for the source or
file. However, if we are using the database table as our source, target, or lookup transform-
ation, we will need to define the database connection that we discussed in the
Working with
session task
section of this chapter. Before you can assign the connection in the session
task, you need to configure the connection object in the workflow. This is similar to adding
the database connection object in the PowerCenter Designer.
There are various types of connection objects that Informatica PowerCenter supports:
•
Relation connection
: As mentioned previously, before you can define connection
values in a session task, you need to add the connection under Workflow Manager.
You can create a connection for any type of relational database, such as Oracle,
SQL, DB2, and so on.
•
FTP connection
: You can create a File Transfer Protocol connection to transfer the
files.
•
External loader connection
: Informatica supports an external loader that directly
loads the data from files to database tables. The external loader eliminates the need
to run SQL commands to insert data into the table.
•
Queue connection
: These connections enable the processing of message queues.
•
Application connection
: You can create connections to enable session tasks and
extract the data from or load the data into applications such as Salesforce,
PeopleSoft, Siebel, and TIBCO.
Note that apart from the relational connection, all other connection objects are rarely re-
quired based on your project requirements. So, you might be more interested in learning re-
lational database first.
