Data Integration Hub Overview
Data Integration Hub is an application integration solution that your organization can use to share and synchronize data between different applications in the organization.
To publish data to Data Integration Hub, first define the data set that you want to manage, for example, sales, customers, or orders. You define a data set by defining a topic. A topic defines the structure of the data that Data Integration Hub stores in the publication repository and the type of publication repository where data is stored. You can manage multiple topics that represent different data sets in Data Integration Hub. Applications publish data to topics and subscribe to data sets that are represented by topics.
Multiple applications can publish to the same topic, for example, different ordering applications can publish their orders to the same Orders topic. Multiple subscribers can consume the data from a topic. Different subscribing applications can consume the data in different formats and in different latencies based on a defined schedule.
Data Integration Hub stores the data that applications publish to topics in the Data Integration Hub publication repository. Data Integration Hub keeps the data in the publication repository until all subscribers consume the data and the retention period expires, and then deletes the data from the publication repository.
Applications can use PowerExchange® adapters and Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services℠ connectors to share data from different sources, such as database tables, files, or any sources that Informatica supports. Each application can be a publisher and a subscriber to different topics.
Publications publish to a specific topic. A publication defines the data source type and the location from where Data Integration Hub retrieves the data that the application publishes. Subscriptions subscribe to one or more topics. A subscription defines the data target type and the location in the subscribing application to where Data Integration Hub sends the published data.
When you create a publication or a subscription, you can choose to use either an automatic Data Integration Hub mapping or a custom Data Integration Hub mapping. Data Integration Hub creates automatic mappings based on the data structure that you define in the topic. Custom Data Integration Hub mappings are based on PowerCenter® workflows, Data Engineering Integration mappings, or Data Integration tasks that the developer creates and maintains for the publication or the subscription.
Data Integration Hub operator uses Enterprise Data Catalog to discover and leverage existing Data Integration Hub objects, and understand their lineage and impact on other entities in the enterprise.
Examples
You run a data center for a major retail chain. The main office has multiple applications. Some of the applications are located on-premises and some are located on the cloud. Each retail branch has a point-of-sale (POS) application and an inventory application. Your applications and branches require the following data:
- Customer service applications
- Require up-to-date customer order data.
- Sales applications
- Require up-to-date product sales data.
- Marketing application
- Requires a weekly deals report.
- Accounting application
- Requires a monthly deals report.
- Branch applications
- Require up-to-date inventory and pricing data.
- Business Intelligence (BI) application
- Requires a weekly report of sales and marketing data and of user interaction data from the corporate website, for the preceding 12 months.
With Data Integration Hub, you can address the following use-cases:
- Share product catalog and prices.
- You can share product price updates from the sales department with each branch, as follows:
- 1. Create a Products topic.
- 2. For the Product Information Management (PIM) application, define a publication that publishes product details and prices to the Products topic and set the schedule to publish the data daily.
- 3. For each branch application, define a subscription to the Products topic and set the subscription to consume the published data when it is available in Data Integration Hub.
- Share daily sales details.
- You can share the daily sales details that you receive from the stores with your central sales application and your customer service applications, as follows:
- 1. Create a Sales topic.
- 2. For each branch application, define a publication to the Sales topic, and set the schedule to publish daily.
- 3. For the sales application, define a subscription to the Sales topic, and set the schedule to consume the data when it is published.
- 4. For the customer service application, define a subscription to the Sales topic, and set the schedule to consume the data once a week.
- Share deal details from Salesforce.
- You can share deal details from a Salesforce cloud application with the marketing and accounting applications, as follows:
- 1. Create a Deals topic.
- 2. For the Salesforce application, define a cloud publication to the Deals topic, and set the schedule to publish weekly.
- 3. For the marketing application, define a subscription to the Deals topic, and set the schedule to consume the data once a week.
- 4. For the accounting application, define a subscription to the Deals topic, and set the schedule to consume the data once a month.
- Share business intelligence data.
- You can share sales data from Salesforce, marketing data from the marketing application, and user interaction data from the corporate website with the BI application as follows:
- 1. Create a Business Intelligence topic with a Hadoop publication repository and set the publication data retention period to 365 days.
- 2. For the Salesforce application, define a cloud publication to the Business Intelligence topic, and set the schedule to publish once a week.
- 3. For the marketing application, define a publication to the Business Intelligence topic, and set the schedule to publish once a week.
- 4. For the corporate website application, define a cloud publication to the Business Intelligence topic, and set the schedule to publish once a week.
- 5. For the BI application, define an aggregated subscription to the Business Intelligence topic, and set the schedule to consume the data once a week.