Anyone used Informatica Powercenter and FME together?

Question

FME apparently integrates with Informatica Powercenter. I use Informatica quite a bit to move data around, push and pull to ArcSDE, and to slurp mass quantities of XML into SQL Server. I'm particularly interested in extracting DWG attributes and features and pushing them to featureclasses in SDE and into tabular SQL Server databases as well. Does anyone have any experience with anything like this or just Informatica and FME together, in general?

I'm currently extracting data from DWGs through ArcObjects, and it can be painful. So, I guess my specific question to anyone with experience would be just how well does FME integrate with Informatica?

Answer 1

We do have a few customers currently using FME in conjunction with Informatica. The integration lets you run FME Workspaces that (authored in the FME Workbench environment) as part of an Informatica workflow. The FME Workspaces can get at the bits and bytes of various spatial formats and provide a very fine grained level of control on data movement and mining, without needing to write any "code", be it Python/C++/Java/etc. Our users report very high productivity (and yes, we do a great job of DWG as well).

To be very clear, we have made an "Informatica" reader and an "Informatica" writer for FME, which read and write data from/to an Informatica workflow. So you embed a call out to an FME Workspace inside of your Informatica workflow, passing it data already in Informatica's universe, or passing it nothing. And the FME Workspace will then run, sending data back into the Informatica universe, or simply writing to whatever system or format directly using FME technology. But in any case, the FME part operates under the control of Informatica. This gives complete flexibility as to what part of a transformation and data IO gets done in which application, while still having them all work in concert.

We'd be happy to work with you if you'd like to experiment with this, or even just experiment with pulling apart DWG files (one of my favorite hobbies) -- drop me an email and I'll get you set up.

Thanks for the question.

Dale (dale.lutz AT safe.com)