Exadata and Informatica Powercenter

Question

We are experiencing a lot of problems with OWB on the Exadata V2.
When OWB does its jobs, it runs fantastic on the Exadata. But OWB is not stable. We get a lot of issues with its reliability. Scheduled jobs do not start or stop halfway with strange errors like "More fun" or "recovery of this request is in progress"...
Now we are looking for a new tool and we want to try Powercenter from Informatica. I have some questions about it.
Does anyone have it running on the Exadata?
Does anyone use the "Push Down"-option of Informatica to do some work in the database instead of in its engine?
What is the loss (is there a loss) of perfomance?
Can anyone tell me his experience to use Powercenter installed on de Exadata?

Answer 1

Suheyl:
I've run Informatica PowerCenter to do ETL with Exadata with good results. It was run without the database pushdown option, so the database just sees single row insert statements. This isn't optimal from an Oracle perspective, but handles our volume 10's of millions of rows per day without breaking a sweat. The other drawback of single row inserts is that they can't use columnar compression; periodic table rebuilds are required to get the compression benefits.
user128:
The restrictions on third party software are no different from a traditional SAN environment: you can install whatever software you want to the database servers (and on machines connected via network to them), but the storage server itself (SAN controller, filer head, or whatnot) runs only a software build supplied by the manufacturer. The one exception in the Exadata case is the OFA/InfiniBand driver, which should be kept in sync with what's running on the storage server.
Marc