Has anyone used Informatica to build a universe?
cindihowson (BOB member since 2002-08-30)
I have. It is a product you can ask from the Bo support. You get to create a universe based on the target you have created with your ETL tool. The bridge uses business logic specified in your ETL tool to name the objects in the universe.
-Pasi
Pasi Tervo 
(BOB member since 2002-09-03)
Thanks, Pasi. Can I ask you some follow up questions for a book I am working on? I would like to know if you are generally satisfied with it and also, if you can updated the universe once built. I have gotten conflicting information on this.
In the bridge documentation, it says you can detect changes and do incremental updates.
But unofficially, I have heard that it ruins existing reports as it does not respect the object id.
Thanks,
Cindi Howson
direct email: cindihowson@askcindi.com
cindihowson (BOB member since 2002-08-30)
Sorry it has taken this long to respond, have been away from this forum for quite a while. I haven’t used the Informatica-BO bridge for a long time - and if I remember correctly the bridge did not have an option to update universes - it just creates them. I do not have the product installed anymore and therefore can not answer your questions in detail. Sorry.
However, if you really need a bridge between an etl tool and BO Designer I suggest you test BO’s own Data Integrator 6. It has an inbuilt xml-based bridge in the product itself (called universal metadata bridge) and in addition to creation can also update previously created universes. Works beautifully. The bridge is in the same installation cd with DI6 and is very easy to set up and use.
cheers, Pasi
Pasi Tervo (BOB member since 2002-09-03)
In case anyone was keeping tabs, the Universal Metadata Bridge (1.0) is available as a download via the tech support’s ESD site, and it does support universe updating.
We just got PowerCenter 6.1 and I’ve been attempting to get this to work, but I’m such an Informatica noob, I am not sure what I’m doing. Does anyone have some experience at creating universes from Informatica targets that can post some sort of guide? Or is one already available?
Thanks,
Blake
Blake Sanders (BOB member since 2002-08-29)
UMB 1.0 does not support informatica’s use of business names - for that you still need the informatica-specific bridge which uses more of the meta data. Apparently 5.1 allows universe updates.
cindihowson (BOB member since 2002-08-30)