Informatica B2B Data Transformation: First Look

Although I am pretty much new to this technology, but still I would like to share what I know about it, mainly because there is very less help material available on the net. I recently switched jobs, and my new job is in a start up with offices at London, New York and Mumbai. The first thing that I got trained in, and part of which is going on is on the Informatica B2B technology (B2B Data transformation and B2B Data Exchange). As per my knowledge, Informatica bought a company/product named Complex Data Exchange (CDE) seven or eight years ago and then integrated it to the main tool as B2B technology. This technology is very new in the market, I have hardly come across any developers and users yet, but it is on the rise, and slowly many businesses are starting to understand the importance of it. 

Informatica Power Centre, as we know, is useful when the data is in the form of tables, or more generally, structured data. Informatica B2B Data transformation is a tool which deals with unstructured data. When I say unstructured, it doesn't necessary mean that there is no logic at all in the source file. The thing is, the structure and logic present in the source file cannot be handled by Data management tools such as Informatica or DataStage (not sure about DataStage though). This feature helps the business for better data integration across departments and regions. The formats which are generally handled by B2B are xml, doc, xls, HL7, HIPAA, SWIFT, etc. The back-end of this tool is coded in JAVA, and thus can be altered with add on libraries (thought till now I have not felt the need of it).

This is how a normal working screen looks like. On the right side, we can see the source file on which the operations take place (format here is xml). On the left, we have the Data transformation Explorer, which gives us the information about the projects and its components (source file, script (actual code), XSD (xml schema definition), Results (output) and also additional files if required). Below, we see the various options such as Help View, Events view, Schema view etc. We will go in deeper on each of the features later, but the point to be noted here is the Events view tab, which contains the execution path of the whole project or part of it. Basically, it captures everything the back-end engine is performing as it runs through each line of the code and puts it in an events file, which has the format – '.cme'. The middle section is the one where we write the code (the script file has the format - .tgp). There are two modes of coding, one is pure java, and the other is Intelli-mode, which is being shown here. We can switch between these modes by just right-clicking on the code section and choosing the other mode.

Presently, I cannot help with the installation part because I got the software already installed by my employer. But, with time, a situation may arrive where I may need to know.

Before we start coding with B2B DT, we need some basic knowledge about XML schemas and Regex expression. These are pretty simple, and you can easily find them on net. Well, this was just an introduction to the world of B2B. I will post soon about whatever I know. Hopefully, it helps both the readers and me.

For now, just remember the top level things such as - why B2B is used, how the screen looks, what data formats it handles etc.