Prerequisites

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

Before you install the PowerCenter OCF connector, ensure that you:

Enable Network Connectivity

Open outbound TCP port 1521 to Oracle and port 1433 to the SQL Server database server.

Create a Service Account

Create a user for the Informatica PowerCenter repository. See Create the PowerCenter Repository User.

Permissions

Read access is required for the Informatica PowerCenter repository database configured (Oracle or SQL Server). Data is extracted from the database using MX views and tables.

Required Information

Database Properties

To configure the Informatica PowerCenter, the database properties of the associated data sources (Oracle or SQL Server) are required.

To get the database properties:

  1. Log in to Informatica Administrator.

  2. Click Services and Nodes.

  3. In the Domain Navigator pane, select the Domain and then select the Repository Service from where the data needs to be extracted.

  4. Go to Properties > Database Properties.

  5. Copy the Database Username and Database Password to your local machine.

See Database Properties in Informatica PowerCenter docs for more information.

Preconfigure Cross-Source Lineage in Informatica PowerCenter

To extract the schema details for source and target data sources from the repository database:

  1. Go to Workflow Designer and select the repository.

  2. In the Edit Tasks window, go to Mapping tab.

  3. Click Sources folder in the left pane and select the source.

  4. In the Properties section, provide the Owner Name and Source Table Name for the selected source. For Snowflake and Redshift databases, the owner name must be in the format: database_name.schema_name (case-sensitive). Example: dev.public

  5. Click the Targets folder in the left pane and select the target.

  6. In the Properties section, provide the Table Name Prefix for the selected target.

  7. Click Ok.

Ensure Proper Session Property Configuration (Workflow Manager)

  • If the Owner/Prefix name or the Source/Target table name are provided in the Informatica session properties, those values will be considered to construct the cross-source lineage.

  • If the Owner/Prefix name or the Source/Target table name aren’t provided in the session properties, then the default value (Username from Relational Connection Credentials) will be used to build the cross-source lineage.

Default Handling by Database Type

  • Oracle: Schema is inferred from the user credentials.

  • SQL Server: Defaults to schema dbo.

  • PostgreSQL (ODBC): Defaults to schema public.

  • Snowflake and Amazon Redshift (ODBC) schema requirements:

    • For these systems, the schema must be specified in the format: DatabaseName.SchemaName.

    • If only the database name is provided, the connector will default to schema public.

Configure Cross-Source Lineage for Informatica PowerCenter in Alation

Prior to running metadata extraction, you must configure cross-source lineage between the Informatica PowerCenter data source and other RDBMS sources:

See Relational Sources and Relational Targets for more details on Informatica data sources.