Jeff's Cluttered Mind

Here's a companion tip to the "VBScript to convert CSV to XLS" post.

This script will combine two Excels files into one workbook. The files will be treated as separate worksheets inside the workbook. The worksheet names will be the same as the file names.

You may find this useful when an Inforamtica process outputs multiple flat files and you have converted them into native Excel format but only wish to present one file to the end user (or for archiving or reporting purposes).

Here is a sample mapping to illustrate how the Transaction Control transformation can dynamically create multiple flat file outputs, each with a unique name and data set.

The mapping reads a source table whose key is “Group Id”, and outputs a separate target file for each Group Id data set. The file names are also generated dynamically based on the Group Id.

Informatica allows options for sending email at the session level (on Session Success or Failure) but there is not a standard way to send email from the mapping. By using a web service (written in a third party language such as .Net or Java) to send email, you can generate email from a mapping based on conditional logic and include relevant "pipeline" data in the email body. An additional advantage, if you are using HTML email, you have unlimited options to format the body of the email.

Here is a technique that can be used to unschedule workflows automatically or conditionally. This process uses the pmrep command to unschedule any workflows specified in a CSV file.

I have a copy of this workflow scheduled on our development server using the scheduling option "Run on Integration Service initialization". I do this because any restart of the Informatica service will “re-schedule” unscheduled workflows.

The workflow runs one mapping and calls one command task.

Here is a reusable email task you can use for the “On Failure E-Mail” property for any Informatica session. If the session fails an email is sent to an address you specify. The content of the email is generic but you get all relative information about the session’s failure, plus the session log as an email attachment.

Download the task and import it into a PowerCenter folder. Next set the “On Failure E-Mail” for a session to "reusable" and chose the email task.

Note: This tip is part of a series on administration scripts.

These scripts automate the process to grant permissions to PowerCenter Folders, Connections and Query objects. In my company’s PowerCenter development environment, we allow each developer to access all folders and connection objects. Our security structure is designed so all developers are in a security group, these scripts grant access to the security group.

We use this process because if a developer creates a new folder and does not grant access to the developer security group, other developers will not have access to the folder. We run these scripts daily so new folder, connection and query objects are accessible to everyone.

The Sequence Generator transformation is great sometimes but I cannot find a way to reset the generated sequence based on external conditions. For example, when a value in the current row is different from the value in a previous row, I would like to reset the Sequence number.

Using some information I found on Informatica’s Knowledge base, I created a reusable Expression that will increment or reset a counter (sequence number) based on an input port's value. The counter will increment when a chosen input port's current row is equal to the previous row and reset the counter when the current row's value does not match the value from a previous row.

Summary:   This tip will show you how to augment the pmrep command's backup function with environment variables to dynamically create the backup file names.  I've included a visual basic script that can be used to delete old backup files from any folder.  The result is a script you can schedule on your Windows server for unattended repository backups.

• An example backup script and the visual basic script to delete files based on age can be downloaded here.
• To fully utilize my example script you should be using the techniques described in my post about using Server Environment Variables