Informatica PowerCenter Technical Lineage using EDGe

Sheeri,

We are attempting to create technical lineage via Edge for Informatica Powercenter. We have followed the instructions and run the process. It parses the Informatica Powercenter files that we exported and store locally just fine. But the stitching is not working correctly. The process is not able to correctly link the tables and columns specified in the Informatica files to the schema, tables, and columns that we previously ingested. We followed the instructions from here https://productresources.collibra.com/docs/collibra/latest/Content/CollibraDataLineage/TechnicalLineage/InstallationAndConfiguration/ta_prepare-external-directory-folder.htm.

Can you give us some specific examples of a successful lineage harvester for Informatica Powercenter including parameter files and source ID configuration file as described in steps 3 and 4 of the documentation linked above?

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We are attempting to create technical lineage via Edge for Informatica Powercenter. We have followed the instructions and run the process. It parses the Informatica Powercenter files that we exported and store locally just fine. But the stitching is not working correctly. The process is not able to correctly link the tables and columns specified in the Informatica files to the schema, tables, and columns that we previously ingested. We followed the instructions from the Collibra documentation

Can you give us some specific examples of a successful lineage harvester for Informatica Powercenter including parameter files and source ID configuration file as described in steps 3 and 4 of the documentation?

Hello!

Collibra places an error in technical lineage for PowerCenter when there is not a full source ID configuration file. If you go to technical lineage, and click on the “Settings” tab and click the “Show status” button, you will see the status pane instead of lineage.

After the source list there is a “Full-text search” with a box - if you type “configuration” in the box, you will get a transformation with a name like CONFIGURATION and a Status description like "IMPORTANT: Please, define ‘UNDEFINED’ values in your configuration file."

If you click on this, you will get output you can copy and paste for a template for the file you need to fill in. It has filled in the information it knows - the names of the connections from PowerCenter - and you will need to fill in the mapping for the rest.

I can see that you have these connections (lines 10-17 in the template):

"$DBConnection_Tgt": {
  "dbname": "UNDEFINED",
  "schema": "UNDEFINED"
},
"$DBConnection_Src": {
  "dbname": "UNDEFINED",
  "schema": "UNDEFINED"
},

I expect your parameter files should have $DBConnection_Src and $DBConnection_Tgt in them, otherwise we won’t be able to parse those variables.

Everyone uses parameter files differently in PowerCenter - some don’t use parameter files at all - so we cannot give more than a generic example as it may not be applicable. This is why we provide the more detailed template to fill out in the errors.

Hope this helps!

Thanks for the response. We followed the instructions from here https://productresources.collibra.com/docs/collibra/latest/Content/CollibraDataLineage/TechnicalLineage/TechnicalLineageviaEdge/to_tech-lin-edge-workflow.htm

We do have a parameter file that defines parameters $DBConnection_Src and $DBConnection_Tgt. The parameter file contains:

#USE_SECTIONS
$DBConnection_Src=ORA_edw_CERNER_DM
$DBConnection_Tgt=ORA_edw_CERNER_DM
$$p_Days_Back=2

I think part of the confusion is the statement from the above-referenced Collibra documentation page that says:

“Important. If you are using variables in Informatica PowerCenter, add the value of the variable instead of the name in the connection definitions. For example, if the parameter file contains $DBConnection_dwh=DWH_EXPORT”, then use DWH_EXPORT in the connection definition.

Since our parameter file resolves the parameter to “ORA_edw_CERNER_DM”, we used that in our connection definition (this is in the “Source Configuration” setting of our Edge Capability)

"connectionDefinitions": {
	"ORA_edw_CERNER_DM": {
		"dbname": "Oracle EDW",
		"schema": "CERNER_MIL",
		"dialect": "oracle"
	},
	"ORA_edw_CERNER_DM": {
		"dbname": "Oracle EDW",
		"schema": "CERNER_DM",
		"dialect": "oracle"
	}
},
"collibraSystemNames": {
	"connections": [
		{
			"connectionName": "ORA_edw_CERNER_DM",
			"collibraSystemName": "Canyons EDW RAC Clinical"
		}
	]
}

}