Informatica Standards

Informatica Standards and Thoughts

Good Standards

• Always set the error threshold to 1
• Always check "fail parent if this task fails"
• Always check "Run if previous completed" on command tasks
• Try to avoid overriding reuseable Tasks and Sessions... if you get a "Revert" button while making a change, make sure the change should only apply to THIS instance, rather than every instance, and consider making the change in another place.
• Scripts should always write to <stdout>; only the highest level call should redirect to a log file with "> <log> 2>&1" style
• Use Admin Tables: ADMIN_FEED_TO_TABLE, etc. (needed for checking MLoad errors, etc.)
• Set Error Threshold to 1 in MLoad configuration. This does NOT mean you can avoid a separate check for MLoad errors; UV errors are not properly reported back to Informatica, but ET errors will at least fail the load
• Ensure workflow and session logs are directed to the appropriate directory, as the default is not precise enough

Discussion Items

• Where should shell script redirects to log files be? In the Informatica command task that calls them? Should the script handle its own log file? If a BTEQ script is called from a shell script, should the shell script handle the BTEQ log but something else handle the shell script log? Or should the BTEQ just pass through stdout and stderr to the script, which is then redirected by Informatica?
• There's some issue with the XML Parser that it doesn't always generate rows if some of the nested elements are missing. There's a "Force Row" check box in the source XML editor which alleviates this problem. I'll have a picture up around here about it sometime.