Informatica PowerExchange: Oracle Real-Time Option

Today’s IT organizations are faced with growing demand for timely access to critical operational data stored in Oracle-based transactional systems.
New business initiatives, such as improving customer service, meeting governance and compliance requirements, consolidating systems or
optimizing integration processes, present challenges to IT for finding an efficient, cost effective way to gain real-time data access without impacting
existing applications. Until now, the most common approach has been one of two methods—source entire bulk data sets or hand code change-
capture solutions that rely on application triggers and/or date stamps. Informatica PowerExchange™ for Oracle: Real-Time Option offers IT
organizations using Oracle a non-invasive software based on a service-oriented architecture for capturing changes in real time or on a scheduled
basis without requiring application programming—removing implementation complexity, while reducing overall costs.

Key Benefits of Informatica PowerExchange

• No additional triggers or timestamps required to existing applications
• Non-invasive architecture leverages Oracle LogMiner’s “continuous mine” capability
• Capture capabilities are at a granular table or column level allowing for fine grain control
• Changes are propagated using “push” or “pull” approaches
• Only committed, trusted data is moved
• Seamless management of rollback and recovery
• Seamless integration with the Informatica PowerCenter®, EAI, and other data integration technologies

Figure 1: Informatica PowerExchange Product Architecture

The Informatica Approach
Informatica’s patented, high performance change-capture architecture uniquely delivers the technology required by IT to fully leverage mission-
critical data held in Oracle RDBMS technology while dramatically reducing the cost, complexity, and volume of data moving across the enterprise.
PowerExchange for Oracle: Real-Time option, like Informatica PowerCenter® and other Informatica® products, is based on a metadata-driven
engine that eliminates the expense and risk in writing code, and provides the flexibility required by the most demanding IT organizations to enable
timely delivery of up-to-date information to applications, processes, and business people.

Technical Overview
Deploy without change to existing applications—due to the critical nature of Oracle RDBMS-based transactional applications, it is an operational
imperative that no changes to the existing database structures (e.g., adding timestamps, status fields, and/or triggers) are required when
implementing a change-capture technology. With PowerExchange, no changes are required to existing applications. PowerExchange interoperates
seamlessly with Oracle’s change facility, LogMiner, as its source of transactional change. By operating off a log-based facility, installation,
configuration, development, deployment, and maintenance of change-based data integration solutions are significantly simplified.

Make data available on-demand to multiple subscribers—changes can be retrieved on a scheduled basis or streamed in continuous, real-time
mode to support varying integration scenarios. Only committed data and control information, such as transaction type (e.g., insert, update, delete,
etc.) and absolute timestamp are made available to “change subscribers” or consuming applications. Multiple subscribers can access changed data
for different integration purposes through the same infrastructure to ensure broad use of strategic data from a single source.

Manage errors and recover where processing left off—one of the difficult issues when developing a change capture-based solution—whether it is
a hand-coded or product-based solution—is handling error recovery and intelligent session recovery upon a system, network, or software restart.
Because recovery and restart are built into the architecture of PowerExchange, the need for programming and exception handling is eliminated. As
transaction data is made available for downstream processing, PowerExchange logs time stamp synchronization tokens to ensure full recovery and
roll-back in the event of a failure. Logging is done in memory and written to disk based on flexible commit points so that a balance can be achieved
between maximum throughput and minimal roll-back time. A restart command then uses the token log to understand what data was made available
to a downstream consumer.

Move only committed, trusted data—data Integration is a difficult challenge without having the added complexity of managing transactional roll-
back boundaries. PowerExchange provides a “Unit of Work” cleanser capability that ensures that only committed transaction data is made available.
This capability interfaces with Oracle LogMiner, monitoring commit points of the data elements registered for change. This streamlines overall
development and removes unnecessary complexity.

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Propagate changes using push or pull—data integration requires various methods of execution to support different technical or business
requirements. In some instances, an architecture that supports a push model is needed to drive changed data into a message queue for downstream
consumption. Other scenarios may require a pull of data by a data integration product, such as Informatica PowerCenter, for cleansing and
transformation before being loaded into a target database. Both push and pull models are supported by PowerExchange, providing maximum
deployment flexibility.

Visual tools ease the configuration and management of change capture—developing change-capture solutions by hand is difficult and costly for
even the most sophisticated IT organizations. LogMiner efficiently captures changed data but, if used directly, it requires hand coding to access,
manage, and propagate changed data. Further coding is also needed to handle error recovery and scheduling, all of which are essential for end-to-
end processing of the captured changes.

PowerExchange provides a graphical user interface, the PowerExchange Navigator, which allows users to configure extraction applications. Each
application is represented as a visual metadata map comprised of the specific tables and/or columns involved in a change-capture scenario. Only
those data elements required for a particular project are included in the metadata map which the Navigator uses to manage the set up and
configuration of LogMiner for capturing those data elements. If errors occur in the capture process, the Navigator understands where to pick up in
the transactional log to fully recover.

Figure 2: Selecting Specific Columns for Change Capture

With PowerExchange, graphical installation, implementation, and operation of end-to-end change-capture processes eliminate the traditional cost
and time associated with developing, testing, and maintaining code. And it significantly reduces the burden of facilitating on-going change
management in response to new business demands.

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System Requirements
• Oracle 9.2.0.3 or higher
• Oracle RAC supported with Oracle 10G and higher
• ARCHIVELOGGING mode enabled at a minimum of “System” for supplemental logging
• All data types supported except: Long, Long Raw, LOB
• Source operating systems: Windows 2000, XP, AIX 5.1 and above, Solaris 2.7 and above, HPUX 11 and above

WORLDWIDE HEADQUARTERS
2100 Seaport Boulevard ● Redwood City, CA 94063, USA
Phone 650.385.5000 ● Fax 650.385.5500 ● Toll-free in the US 1.800.970.1179
www.informatica.com

© 2004 Informatica Corporation. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. Informatica, the Informatica logo, Turning integration into insight, PowerExchange, and PowerCenter are
trademarks or registered trademarks of Informatica Corporation in the United States and in jurisdictions throughout the world. All other company and product names may be tradenames
or trademarks of their respective owners. Part no. 6025 (07/04)

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