How to improve performance of a lookup by using “Pre-build Lookup Cache” option?

By default Informatica Integration service starts building the lookup cache only when the first input row is received by the lookup transformation during the session execution. This may sometimes cause the session to wait until the cache is build especially for large lookup files or complex lookup queries. In order to start building the lookup […]

Introduction to Data Masking transformation in Informatica

Data Masking is a passive transformation added to Informatica version 8.6 which can be used to mask confidential data when transferring data to untrusted destinations. You pass in the columns to be masked to the input group and then configure the masking formats for each input port. The resulting output ports will contain data that […]

How to handle high precision dates in Informatica? the ones with milliseconds.

Whenever you import a source from Oracle with a timestamp field, Informatica automatically imports that field as date with precision of 26 and scale 6. This means that any digits in the milliseconds range will get truncated while reading or writing to the table/file. This means losing the intended precision of data resulting in incorrect […]

How to avoid Null = Null comparisons in Informatica lookup transformation

Informatica lookup transformation by default evaluates Null = Null condition to be true. This means if you do not explicitly take care of passing Not Null values to lookup input ports then the lookup might return random records from the lookup source. It is not certain if this is a bug or done intentionally by […]

What happens when a Return port is not specified in an Unconnected Informatica Lookup

An unconnected lookup in Informatica can return only one port’s value. This is usually the port which is marked as ‘R’ in the Ports tab of the lookup transformation But if there is only one Output port in the lookup transformation and all the other other ports are the ones used in the condition of […]

How to remove the hash symbol from Informatica header output

In Informatica there is a very handy option to automatically generate column names as a header row in the flat file output. This option serves its purpose except for the fact it places a “#” (hash) symbol at the beginning of the header row by default. And, it seems there is no easy way to […]