Recently, a colleague called in for an issue that he was facing with an Informatica mapping. Let me recreate that situation here -
There is a mapping that get n ports from a source and loads m ports to a target. Standard stuff, nothing special or fishy around there. There comes a change request that says, such and such x number of columns are not required in the target, and since there would be a sure performance penalty for carrying through extra data (however small), the mapping should be changed to remove those ports from the pipeline.
What this gentleman did was to remove the connections for those ports from the source qualifier onwards. That saved him from changing and re-importing the source definition.
However, the mapping execution failed, complaining about a certain error situation. Thats when I got the call :)
whether I could discuss and fix it is something else, but what was the reason of the error - ?
The very fact that if you are bringing in certain ports in the source qualifier, you HAVE to take them forward. Thats a rule from informatica's side. Which means, if you are pulling up n ports from the source, you HAVE to expose all those n ports going away from the source qualifier. Or, putting it differently, in whichever way you create a set of ports in your source qualifier, all of them have to be consumed by some transformation object. Not a single one can be left unconnected, on the input side or the output side. Simple.
That was the reason, and the solution was fairly simple, to reduce his effort, either remove the ports from source qualifier as well, or just carry them forward to one transformation. and then drop them onwards.
Having said that, the very reason for which this whole change was initiated, the performance gain that would come through by not having the extra ports being carried forward, would come only when you remove the un-wanted ports from the source itself.
There is a mapping that get n ports from a source and loads m ports to a target. Standard stuff, nothing special or fishy around there. There comes a change request that says, such and such x number of columns are not required in the target, and since there would be a sure performance penalty for carrying through extra data (however small), the mapping should be changed to remove those ports from the pipeline.
What this gentleman did was to remove the connections for those ports from the source qualifier onwards. That saved him from changing and re-importing the source definition.
However, the mapping execution failed, complaining about a certain error situation. Thats when I got the call :)
whether I could discuss and fix it is something else, but what was the reason of the error - ?
The very fact that if you are bringing in certain ports in the source qualifier, you HAVE to take them forward. Thats a rule from informatica's side. Which means, if you are pulling up n ports from the source, you HAVE to expose all those n ports going away from the source qualifier. Or, putting it differently, in whichever way you create a set of ports in your source qualifier, all of them have to be consumed by some transformation object. Not a single one can be left unconnected, on the input side or the output side. Simple.
That was the reason, and the solution was fairly simple, to reduce his effort, either remove the ports from source qualifier as well, or just carry them forward to one transformation. and then drop them onwards.
Having said that, the very reason for which this whole change was initiated, the performance gain that would come through by not having the extra ports being carried forward, would come only when you remove the un-wanted ports from the source itself.
