It is a known fact that ETL testing is one of the crucial aspects of any Business Intelligence (BI) based application. In order to get the quality assurance and acceptance to go live in business, the BI application should be tested well beforehand.
The primary objective of ETL testing is to ensure that the Extract, Transform & Load functionality is working as per the business requirements and in sync with the performance standards.
Before we dig into ETL Testing with Informatica, it is essential to know what ETL and Informatica are.
Informatica PowerCenter ETL Testing Tool:
Informatica PowerCenter is a powerful ETL tool from Informatica Corporation. It is a single, unified enterprise data integration platform for accessing, discovering, and integrating data from virtually any business system, in any
It is a single, unified enterprise data integration platform for accessing, discovering, and integrating data from virtually any business system, in any format and delivering that data throughout the enterprise at any speed. Through Informatica PowerCenter, we create workflows that perform end to end ETL operations.
Download and Install Informatica PowerCenter:
To install and configure Informatica PowerCenter 9.x use the below link that has step by step instructions: Get more from ETL Testing Certification
Understanding ETL testing specific to Informatica:
ETL testers often have pertinent questions about what to test in Informatica and how much test coverage is needed?
Let me take you through a tour on how to perform ETL testing specific to Informatica.
The main aspects which should be essentially covered in Informatica ETL testing are:
- Testing the functionality of Informatica workflow and its components; all the transformations used in the underlying mappings.
- To check the data completeness (i.e. ensuring if the projected data is getting loaded to the target without any truncation and data loss),
- Verifying if the data is getting loaded to the target within estimated time limits (i.e. evaluating performance of the workflow),
- Ensuring that the workflow does not allow any invalid or unwanted data to be loaded in the target.
Classification of ETL Testing in Informatica:
For better understanding and ease of the tester, ETL testing in Informatica can be divided into two main parts –
#1) High-level testing
#2) Detailed testing
Firstly, in the high-level testing:
- You can check if the Informatica workflow and related objects are valid or not.
- Verify if the workflow is getting completed successfully on running.
- Confirm if all the required sessions/tasks are being executed in the workflow.
- Validate if the data is getting loaded to the desired target directory and with the expected filename (in case the workflow is creating a file), etc.
In a nutshell, you can say that the high-level testing includes all the basic sanity checks.
Coming to the next part i.e. detailed testing in Informatica, you will be going in depth to validate if the logic implemented in Informatica is working as expected in terms of its results and performance.
- You need to do the output data validations at the field level which will confirm that each transformation is operating fine
- Verify if the record count at each level of processing and finally if the target is as expected.
- Monitor thoroughly elements like source qualifier and target in source/target statistics of session
- Ensure that the run duration of the Informatica workflow is at par with the estimated run time. Get more skills from ETL Testing Training
To sum up, we can say that the detailed testing includes a rigorous end to end validation of Informatica workflow and the related flow of data.
Benefits of Using Informatica as an ETL tool:
Informatica is a popular and successful ETL tool because:
- It has a high “go live” success rate (nearly 100%)
- Informatica has the capability of enabling Lean Integration.
- It is a moderately priced tool when compared to other ETL tools.
- It comes with internal job scheduler. So, there is no need to use third-party scheduler separately like some other ETL tools do.
- Easy training and tool availability has made Informatica more popular.
Some useful Tips to assist you in Informatica ETL testing:
- Generate the test data before executing the test scenarios.
- The test data should be in sync with the test case it is used for.
- Make sure that you have covered all the 3 scenarios – no data is submitted, invalid data is submitted and valid data is submitted as an input to Informatica workflow.
- Make sure to test that all the required data is getting loaded to target completely. For this, you can use test case – T003 described above as a sample.
- It is very important to test that the workflow is doing all the data transformations correctly as per business rules.
- I would suggest that for each transformation applied in your Informatica mapping, you should have a checklist to verify output data against it. That way, you can report bugs easily if any transformation is not working fine.
To get in-depth knowledge, enroll for a live free demo on ETL Testing Online Training
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