I am proud to inform you that we have released a new version of Manta Checker for Informatica. What are the best improvements since the last version? Definitely, it is a huge amount of new built-in rules and new templates.

I am proud to inform you that we have released a new version of Manta Checker for Informatica. What are the best improvements since the last version? Definitely, it is a huge amount of new built-in rules and new templates with which you can create more sophisticated rules yourself. In total, there are more than 160 rules and 13 templates in the full version. For example, now you can check whether a data type of a port is compatible with a data type of its expression result, or with a data type of a port to which is connected. Do you sometimes leave some ports accidentally unconnected? Do not worry because Manta Checker will tell you. And what about workflows, do you think it is necessary to know when a session fails? We think so, thus we can check it for you in every session, in every workflow. And we can do it automatically, in just a few seconds.
Since we know it is important to have developer tools as intuitive and easy to handle as possible, we have also improved the user experience. Do you want to list your own historical reports? Do you need to completely rework rule categories and severities to suit your company’s standards? Is it necessary to easily synchronize more application instances? None of these is a problem for the new Manta Checker.
What was the most difficult thing to implement for our team in this version? I think one of the best features now is the ability to also analyze the expression language of Informatica transformations. At first, it looked like a really complex problem to determine a possible data type and precision of an expression. However, we developed a simple grammar for the language, as we are used to do with other languages, and then we analyzed how each operator or function can transform the result. Finally, we tuned this mechanism on many real scripts to increase reliability and to minimize false positives, and now it works great on most of the real cases.
If you want to check this type of rule or another one, there is nothing easier than to try our new Manta Checker demo available online, or to ask for Manta trial.
What comes next? We are now developing Manta Checker for Teradata that will check your SQL, BTEQ and SPL scripts. Moreover, it will also be able to fix some of the issues it identifies, and to do the pretty-print. Check back regularly for fresh news about the development.
Lukáš
Lukáš is a head of Manta development. Do you have any questions for Lukáš? Post them in the comments.