ETL

Open previous versions of objects in Informatica PowerCenter

BI Future

With versioning control, Informatica PowerCenter stores the previous versions of objects inside them. You can open in workspace any of the previous versions. To do that right-click on the object and select Versioning / View History:

OpenPreviousVersionsofObjectsinInformatica2

Now you can see the history of all versioned changes with their dates, users, and comments. Select the version you want to preview with right-click and choose Open in Workspace:

OpenPreviousVersionsofObjectsinInformatica5

Now the session is opened in the workspace (notice the (v2) prefix that indicates the version):

OpenPreviousVersionsofObjectsinInformatica4

You can do that as well with other objects in Workflow Manager and Workflow Designer.  Objects from versioning history will have the prefixes with the version number:

OpenPreviousVersionsofObjectsinInformatica3

Change the colors of status bars in Workflow Monitor

BI Future

How to change status bar color in Informatica PowerCenter Workflow Monitor?

In Workflow Monitor running and succeeded status bars are by default in similar greenish colors. This can be quite confusing and makes it harder to skim quickly through the statuses of  the sessions. To avoid this, you can customize the colors of status bars.

ChangeStatusBarinInformatica

To do that go to Tools / Options and select Gantt Chart tab. Here you can specify two colors for each session (if you choose two different the bar will be a gradient) and color for recovered tasks:

ChangeStatusBarinInformatica1

Let’s choose a light green for running sessions to distinguish it from completed sessions:

ChangeStatusBarinInformatica2

After changing the colors it’s easier to differentiate the statuses of monitored sessions:

ChangeStatusBarinInformatica3

Create a non-reusable session out of reusable in Informatica

BI Future

There is an easy way to create a non-reusable object in Informatica PowerCenter out of a reusable one. This is specially useful when you want to change some settings of the session, so instead of copying the existing one you can drag the non-reusable session directly to workflow and edit the settings there.

A reusable object has the green “cycle” icon in the left corner:

Reusable_session

Notice that a non-reusable session doesn’t have that icon:

Non_reusable_session

How to create the non-reusable session out of a reusable one?

Drag a session (or other object) and just before you drop it in the Designer area hold the CTRL key.

Non_reusable_session

When you’ll hold the CTRL key you can notice that the cursor changed and now has a small  ‘+’ icon. Now you can release the object and you’ll get a non-reusable one.