Last week I had a good experience while I was configuring Informatica 7.1 Power Center. I created repository on MS SQL server. I did this whole setup on my Windows XP Pentium machine. It would have been easy for me if had gone for Oracle instead of SQL server as I used SQL server's windows authentication mode for creating the informatica repository. Here I am putting the details step by step.

1. First I tried with My SQL database for creating repository. When I was trying to create repository I came to know that Informatica doesn't support creating repository on My SQL DB.(not sure, may be I don’t have that license).
2. Then I tried with SQL server 2000. As my machine is not efficient enough to handle the load of oracle and Informatica, I opted for SQL server.
3. I have two license keys for my Informatica. One is Repository key and the other is database connectivity (for Oracle, DB2, MS SQL, Teradata,…) license key.
4. I installed informatica safely and the time was to configure the informatica server and repository server.
5. My informatica server name is my_inf_server and repository is my_rep. While creating the repository on SQL server, I’ve chosen trusted connection i.e. using the windows authentication mode of SQL server. If we choose this option, we need not to have SQL server authentication, i.e. no username and password (which is a default setup for SQL server).
6. Everything went fine until I tried to connect to the repository I created above. I was unable to connect to the repository, as it was mandatory to provide username and password for repository, which I didn’t have. Even I tried with the username that I had while configuring the repository server. Error message is could not find the username in the repository(similar to this).
7. I spent lot of time in resolving this problem and started working from SQL server end. I decided to not to go for windows authentication. For that I must create a login for SQL server as we have in case of Oracle (scott, system, sys,…). I created a login from SQL server’s Enterprise Manager.
8. Then I created a new repository using SQL authentication mode(Not trusted connection). Here I am putting my setup values.

Database          : MS SQL server
Connection String     : (local)@tempDB
User               : sql_user
Password          : *******

1. With this setup I could able to successfully connect to repository by passing this username and pwd.

This was just my experience. Plz don’t take it as a standard.
I started working with informatica. I am trying to run a simple workflow (like printing Hello World in ‘C’), so that I can ensure that my setup is correct. But I am unable to make it. I am facing some errors while running the workflow. The message is similar to ‘Can’t find the dsn name xxxxx…, when the connection is ODBC and ‘Could not prepare statement’, when the connection is SQL server. I am working on this Issue. I will share the progress here…

Thanks
Karteek