What is Informatica and why we need it?

What is Informatica?

Informatica is an ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) or Data Integration tool. Informatica is first ETL tool which comes into the market. It's used to implement Data Warehouse.
It's extracting data from different source (Database/File) and transforming data according to business requirement and loading into Data Warehouse.

Few more points about Informatica

1. Informatica is a Data Integration tool.
2. It's a product of Informatica Company.
3. It's a GUI tool
4. It's developed on JAVA language.
5. It's works in Client-Server Architecture

Why we need it?

To understand this lets take a look on evolution of ETL tool.

Before ETL tool

When there was no tool for ETL job then how the ETL job was done?
We were developing complete Procedural Code according to database in which data warehouse exists.
Ex: If Data Warehouse was on Oracle then complete PL/SQL program, if Sql Server then TSQL program.

Challenges

1) As Code was database specific so, we were not able to read the data from another database.
2)  For a simple job we had to write thousands lines of codes.

Solution:

As a solution for the challenges above ETL Tool evolves and ETL Job simplified. Now through Informatica tool we can read data from any source, transforming it and loading to target.
It's a GUI tool so, it's too user friendly and very easy to implement ETL Job.