Considerations for Informatica 9.1 Upgrade

With 9x wave from Informatica hitting the market big, our long plans for Informatica Upgrade were focused on to 9.1.0 HotFix 2 (a recent release) for the PowerCenter edition. The EOL(end of life) notice from Informatica to end their standard support on 8x also made our decision to focus on the latest and greatest version for the Powercenter. With our development and test environments successfully upgraded, we are heading towards the shadow run of our production environment.

Below are some key points to be considered when doing an upgrade.

Set your expectations

What is the minimal timeframe to get the upgrade done?
What is the available hardware for the upgrade in my company (new procurements if needed)?
Are we purchasing additional PowerCenter Options to improve our existing system?
Addition/removal of PowerConnect/PowerExchange Adapters needed
If windows based, are we going to upgrade to 64-bit Operating system(o/s) ?
Are there any unsupported components in the new version? (In our case, Hyperion Planning DIM adapters were not supported after 8x versions)?
Does this upgrade force me to upgrade any other systems (such as PeopleSoft, Hyperion, SFDC, etc)?
What are the benefits of upgrading to a newer version?

Analyze your current environment

The existing 8x (or older) environment should be analyzed, and a checklist to be prepared to fulfill the expectations and choose the right version.

Current Hardware setup (Operating System, Storage, memory, etc)
PowerCenter Options/License in existing system
PowerExchange adapters and its Compatibility
Batch scripts/ schedulers
Dependency with external systems
Other Data services (such as FTP, IIS etc)

Choose the right version

Choosing the right version of Informatica will be the key to a successful upgrade. We chose to upgrade our windows environment from 32-bit to 64-bit for performance and faster processing, which left us on choosing Informatica 9.1.0 HF 2 (64 bit) windows setup.

Select the needed options

With the time crunch on implementing the upgrade, we are left to look at the options for a later time. But I would recommend to plan and analyze the new options that Informatica provides to enhance the current setup.

The current system should be prepared for the upgrade to make the upgrade process faster. Below are some points you may need to look at

With the completion of the above-mentioned steps successfully, we procured the software, licenses and hardware for the new system. We upgraded our environment successfully without any major issues. We also look forward to use some of the new features and options provided by Informatica to enhance our system. I would write further on more niche topics related to the upgrade in my blogs to come. Thanks for reading and appreciate your valuable feedback.

{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Bhagya raj January 20, 2012 at 1:28 am: Senthil, It’s valuable info, please mention what are the adapters which are not supported? and what type of code have you changed in custom transformation(like Built in function, etc…which is not supported.)
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