Informatica introduced today their PowerCenter Express. I applaud their decisions to finally make their tool ubiquitous. Before the only place I could get event their trial version tool was form Oracle’s edelivery site (https://edelivery.oracle.com/). This is a good step forward for them developers who want to get their hands on PowerCenter.
Now you may download from http://informatica.com/pcexpress there is a Personal Edition, that you could process up to a quarter of a million records per day, it supports a single user, process one job at a time and best of all it is free. There is also a professional edition with no restriction on the number of records per day but it costs $8000/user/year.
You need to give a corporate email to download the tool and general email domain such as (gmail, yahoo) are not supported. Sure, I agree this their way of generating leads but I don’t think it is fair for other people who don’t have access to a corporate email or who are not allowed to use their email to communicate outside domains.
It supports a 32-Bit and 46-Bit Server/ Client version for Windows, 64-Bit Linux version and 32-Bit Client for Windows. Informatica claims you could install up and running PowerCenter Express in 10minutes so I just gave it a shot. The 64-Bit Server/Client version is 1.31 GB and the 32-Bit is 1.17GB zip file.
Well the installation was not very smooth for me at all.
I get the following error on Windows Server 2012 R2
The error message is not very explanatory what is happening was even though I have a 64-Bit Server the 64-Bit installer was not working for me so I download the 32-Bit installer and that one gave me the same error message as the one on Windows 8 machine.
And this error on Windows 8 machine and on 32-Bit installer on Windows Server 2012 R2 64-Bit machine.
To fix this go to the Server folder and right click one the installer and select Properties
Then turn on the compatibility and select Windows 7 that should fix it for you.
After you download your copy Informatica send you the Key file check your email for your key.
Next you will have the review page before you install
Click on Install and the installation starts
After install you may need to configure the domain and repository.
Once the configuration finishes you will get the information how you could open Informatica Administrator Home Page
Installing both on Systems took me about an hour to figure out the way to solve the problem but hopefully you will able to install it in 10 minutes as they say.