Informatica PowerExchange Reviews

We use PowerExchange to track data from the CDC, from sources like Oracle, DB2 or SQL Servers. That is pretty much what this tool is designed for and that's exactly what we use it for.

Overall, it's a good tool. It's currently number one on the market. It pretty much has all the necessary capabilities to pull the incremental data from the source system, technically speaking.

Overall, I am pretty satisfied.

The one place where it could be improved is definitely pricing. That's a very big problem. It depends product to product, but pricing is an issue. They have their own way of pricing it. I'm coming from a technical background, so I don't get myself involved much in pricing.

Additionally, I definitely would love to have a PowerExchange tool without having to connect to the call center, to just to load the data directly into the respective target components. This would be very preferable. 

All in all, they already have a good monitoring tool. It would be better if they could add the feature where we could avoid the call center feed and use PowerExchange directly to our target databases.

I've been working with Informatica for the last 18 years.

Their technical support is good. They have a good system of responding back to queries. Some queries gets resolved immediately and some queries take time to get resolved, but they do get resolved.

PowerExchange is a very good tool to work with. It has the capabilities and compared to other tools, this tool has more features. It collaborates with the call center on more features, so definitely, it's a good tool to work with.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give it an eight.

I would definitely recommend Informatica PowerExchange.

The connection layer Informatica uses to get the data from different sources can change. for traditional systems like databases, Oracle, for example, this is something that is managed by a protocol change. But there are two other key areas. One is integrating with legacy systems, mainframes, and for this one, there are some PowerExchange components. Another important one is getting data in real-time using CDC concepts. For these, there is PowerExchange for CDC. So, it's the three main use cases, legacy data integration, real-time integration, and traditional relational systems integration. PowerExchange is not about users. PowerExchange is something that you deploy on one system and it will give the data in real-time and feed it to multiple consumers. So, in the end, you don't need to have multiple users dealing with PowerExchange. It's one engine to deploy on a specific system and its core function would be to continuously feed the information from that system.

Mainstream integration and real-time integration are the best features.

Real-time has not been enhanced that much over the past few years. There have not been as many features added like they did before. When comparing Informatica PowerExchange to other competing technologies, like Oracle GoldenGate, GoldenGate is selling more features and adding more functions. It's why PowerExchange is still behind GoldenGate for certain functions. The higher availability and fill over capabilities is not that strong, so it needs to be enhanced more. It's not an issue, it's a limitation. Like some new data types that are not supported at all by PowerExchange, some new Oracle table types, like some IUT tables, for example. So, it's missing some features. GoldenGate, for example, is supporting everything in Oracle. It's not a good product in the end. However, Informatica is maybe supporting 80% of the things in Oracle systems. So, it is still missing some functions and some features still need to be supported. For example, if you have data stored like XML content and Oracle table, you cannot get it in real-time using PowerExchange. Supporting all the different data types which are still not supported by the product. Adding more flexibility and what I call administration utilities to manage the product in some graphical way, or some new easy way to use, enhancing the high availability and fill over capabilities of the products.

We have been working with Informatica PowerExchange for six years.

Stability is good, not bad, but it needs to be improved as well. For example, the higher availability and fill over capabilities is not that strong, so it needs to be enhanced more.

Informatica PowerExchange has what they call vertical scalability. For other integration techniques like integration that is deploying multiple parallel agents, and each agent would be collecting the data in parallel. So, you're doing horizontal scalability, adding more horizontal components, and all of them are running in parallel to process the same data. However, in PowerExchange, you can increase the processing power by adding more CPU or adding more resources to increase the capacity.

The support is very good. We always get immediate support. 

It's easy to set up, but it's not that flexible to maintain. It does not have easy interfaces to use, to manage the product. Setup was a little stressful, but the operational tasks and the developer tasks need to be improved as well. It took about a month to deploy.

We have our own team who built our facilities. So, we can manage it from our side without difficulty.

With Informatica PowerExchange it's all about capacity. If you are increasing the processing power, you need to buy additional licenses. So, for example, if you have traffic to be integrated and you need some integration layer or power to some CPU cores, or if you want to increase the capacity to handle additional load, you need to buy additional licenses to increase the platform processing power. So, it's about capacity.

You need to get prepared very well before using it. If you just go with the initial default configuration, it will end up with very poor performance. You need to spend some time getting the technical details and the technical workarounds for the product itself. You need some time to master the product. I would rate Informatica PowerExchange at a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for getting the data from the source and loading it into the warehouse by performing data transformation.

We can now update data from several source files from both a database or java source.

The data transformation is the solution's most valuable feature.

The solution needs better integration with other tools. 

The solution needs to be more user-friendly. Right now, a first time user needs to get training before they can use the solution.

I've been using the solution for five years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. We can include many other sources and load it into the table. The solution can be scaled to various other transformations. We have 100-200 people using the solution currently. We do not plan to increase usage at this time.

We haven't had a reason to reach out to technical support yet.

The initial setup has a moderate amount of difficulty. It's not straightforward, but it's not too complex. Our deployment was a scheduled deployment. We planned it so that it happened incrementally.

We had a team that was specialized in Informatica handle the implementation.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. I'd rate it higher if it was more user-friendly and had better integration with other tools.