Difference Between Ab Initio and Informatica

Ab Initio vs Informatica

Ab Initio and Informatica are pretty technical terms to most people. However, these are two of the most important tools when talking about software and data management. They are superb ETL (extract, transform, and load) tools used by many companies throughout the world today.

Foremost, these tools differ in the companies they serve. Informatica is said to cater to the data integration and management needs of medium to big business companies. It boasts of a broader data integration capability which includes many related functions such as profiling and data quality. Also, it is more mainstream in nature than the Ab Initio. The latter serves many companies under the Fortune 1000 list. It is more of a nich ETL type that is able to handle relatively larger volumes of data.

These two companies have different marketing philosophies. Informatica, being mainstream, makes use of a lot of paper work and online press releases, web forums, and network developers. Surprisingly, Ab Initio almost seems to have no news or information on their products and opts for direct client marketing rather than basing it over the Internet.

Moreover, both Ab Initio and Informatica have parallelism support. However, the latter can only support one kind of parallelism whereas the former has three different parallelisms namely: pipe line, component and data parallelisms.

Scheduling is also more cumbersome in Ab Initio because there’s no scheduler unlike in the case of Informatica. Hence, you need to run a script or enter a schedule manually if you’re using the Ab Initio.

Generally, it has been noticed that Ab Initio is a friendlier system than the Informatica. It is because it is able to process varying text files so you can read or browse through them even if each file is structured differently.

Overall, both the Ab Initio and Informatica are different tools whose appropriateness depends on the company’s need, the nature of data integration needed, amount of data to be handled and the overall infrastructures available among others. Still, there are many other significant differences between the two tools but the most noticeable of which are the following:

1. Informatica is more mainstream and has wider or broader data integration capabilities than Ab Initio

2. Ab Initio generally serves companies under the Fortune 1000 list while Informatica serves other medium to large scale companies.

3. Ab Initio practices direct client marketing while Informatica has a lot of online leg work through press releases, forums and the like.

4. Ab Initio supports three different classes of parallelisms whereas Informatica only supports one type.

Sharing is caring!