HowToInfa: Informatica Best Practices

Import not Copy:-

While deploying a mapping from Dev to QA or QA to Prod,always try to import first.
If you face any error in importing then copy the mapping from source to target environment.
The reason for that is while copying the sources and targets gets copied as NON-SHORTCUT whereas they should have been copied as shortcut.

There might be possibility that in your project you keep all your source/target/transformation/mapplets etc into a shared folder and you are using those components in different different mappings.

In copying they will be copied not as shortcut to that folder but a separate copy which definitely you dont want.

Set relational connection in UTF8 by default
This will avoid much data corruption issues.

Relational connection changes required?-Replace if possible

You may need somtime to fix some passwords/userid/codepage/parrallism in relational connection.
Create a new with your required changes.
Replace the old with this new.
Delete the new.
This will help you avoid validating a no of sessions which might be using the old relational connection.

HowToInfa : Undocked and now can not dock

I got the solution from ITTOOLBOX.
docking problems with powercenter designer

And it is:-
1. close all Informatica instances like Designer , Workflow manager and monitor
2. backup the registry
3. go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER
4. go to SOFTWARE --> Informatica --> POWERMART CLIENT TOOLS --> (whichever version you are using) my case 7.1 -->Designer/Workflow Monitor/WFManager --> Toolbars 7.1
5. rename the folder Tolbars 7.1 to anything like toolbars 7.1_old
6. save and exit the registry editor
7. Restart Informatica Designer/WFManager/WFMonitor