Organizations often seek Informatica's help in making sense of their disparate systems and heterogeneous environment with numerous data silos. Such organizations are finding that while their existing environments may be beneficial for data capture, leveraging that data can be significantly hampered. Furthermore, the lack of integration can limit revenue growth, affect compliance and risk management, and inhibit operational alignment. And performing data analysis and trend detection from multiple data types is nearly impossible.

What's needed is the joint Teradata and Informatica solutions to help increase enterprise visibility and transparency. Using Teradata's core database technologies such as hardware, tools, utilities and services, Informatica moves the data into and out of the Teradata environment. With Informatica acting as the foundation for data movement, and Teradata supporting the data infrastructure, the two systems offer ease of data access, discovery, cleansing, integration and delivery.

Accessing, cleansing, validating
In this era of mergers, acquisitions and corporate restructuring, the ability to access data stores from recently acquired entities or newly designed organizations is crucial. With Informatica PowerExchange, clients can access enterprise data in any format using any source such as legacy, mainframe, semi-structured and unstructured data. Ideally suited to Teradata's active data warehousing environment, PowerExchange enabled one client to unify 200 financial systems; another client achieved better price performance and availability through acquired entities.

enlarge Informatica enables Teradata Warehouse users to access, discover and integrate all data assets (both historical and operational) across the enterprise to enable real-time decision making, organization-wide visibility and regulatory compliance.

To discover data from different data streams and metadata sources, customers use Informatica Data Explorer. Delivering complete and accurate knowledge about data through its automated discovery technique, Data Explorer ensures the fidelity of data processing, important for subsequent steps such as quality validation and integration.

Going beyond traditional name and address cleansing, Informatica Data Quality enables a multi-dimensional management approach to data validation. This is vital, considering regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II. Organizations using Informatica Data Quality can also introduce rigor in managing data through automated monitoring and remediation.

Informatica PowerCenter is a single, unified platform for enterprise data integration, serving as an ideal data foundation for mission-critical operations. For example, one organization accommodated XML/XSD data from new point-of-sale systems for 246 locations worldwide. As a result, the company improved restocking and forecasting with right-time data integration, enabling reports on customer satisfaction, product performance and seasonal sales fluctuations.

Many choices, more benefits
Joint Teradata/Informatica customers also benefit from the real-time performance and active data integration capabilities on the application-neutral, versatile Informatica platform. This allows for a move away from hand-coding toward a standard-based codeless approach.

One aspect of this joint solution is that Informatica offers pushdown optimization, which "pushes" transformation processing from a PowerCenter engine to an applicable relational database like Teradata. PowerCenter acts as a data service layer for any system with broad connectivity and interface support.

The benefits in the pushdown optimization strategy include the reduction of data movement, the utilization of database-specific processing, and the maintenance of metadata and lineage in PowerCenter.

Clients can choose a data integration technique that works best for them. Some might employ pushdown optimization with the extract, transform and load (ETL) approach, which allows customers to extract data from the source systems, transform it inside the Informatica engine on the integration engine server and load it into target tables in the data warehouse. Or they might opt for the extract, load and transform (ELT) approach, by which data is extracted from the source systems, loaded into staging tables inside the data warehouse relational database management system (RDBMS) servers, and transformed inside the RDBMS engine. This method generates SQL with a final insert into the target tables in the data warehouse.

Customers could even choose a hybrid extract, transform, load and transform (ETLT) approach that transforms inside the Informatica engine and applies transformations inside the RDBMS engine.

Empowering success
Data integration is no longer just about ensuring that information is properly stored and available for access. The joint Teradata and Informatica solutions extend beyond traditional analytic-focused data processing. The automated capabilities to access, discover, cleanse, integrate and deliver data empower organizations to act on opportunities aligned with their corporate directives.

By leveraging the combined Teradata and Informatica systems, companies can create an enterprise-wide approach that accelerates their organizational success. T

PRODUCT Informatica PowerCenter, Informatica PowerExchange, Informatica Data Quality, Informatica Data Explorer PRODUCT STATS Delivers enterprise data integration software and services BENEFITS Helps organizations gain greater business value from all of their information assets COMPANY STATS Informatica is a world leader in data integration solutions. Founded in 1993. Redwood City, Calif., USA.

Elizabeth Millard writes about technology.

Teradata is a registered trademark of Teradata Corporation. All other brands and product names appearing in this publication are trademarks of their respective holders.

Teradata Magazine-September 2007