Default values in target tables

Question

I have some mappings, where business entities are being populated after transformation logic. The row volumes are on the higher side, and there are quite a few business attributes which are defaulted to certain static values.

Therefore, in order to reduce the data pushed from mapping, i created "default" clause on the target table, and stopped feeding them from the mapping itself. Now, this works out just fine when I am running the session in "Normal" mode. This effectively gives me target table rows, with some columns being fed by the mapping, and the rest taking values based on the "default" clause on the table DDL.

However, since we are dealing with higher end of volumes, I want to run my session in bulk mode (there are no pre-existing indexes on the target tables).

As soon as I switch the session to bulk mode, this particular feature, (of default values) stops working. As a result of this, I get NULL values in the target columns, instead of defined "default" values.

I wonder -

1. Is this expected behavior ?
2. If not, am I missing out on some configuration somewhere ?
3. Should I be making a ticket to Oracle ? or Informatica ?

my configuration -

Informatica 9.5.1 64 bit, with Oracle 11g r2 (11.2.0.3) running on Solaris (SunOS 5.10)

Looking forward to help here...

Answer 1

Could be expected behavior.

Seem that bulk mode in Informatica use "Direct Path" API in Oracle (see for example https://community.informatica.com/thread/23522 )

From this document ( http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B10500_01/server.920/a96652/ch09.htm , search Field "Defaults on the Direct Path") I gather that:

Default column specifications defined in the database are not available when you use direct path loading. Fields for which default values are desired must be specified with the DEFAULTIF clause. If a DEFAULTIF clause is not specified and the field is NULL, then a null value is inserted into the database.

This could be the reason of this behaviour.

Answer 2

I don't believe that you'll see a great benefit from not including the defaults, particularly in comparison to the benefits of a direct path load. If the data is going to be readonly then consider compression also.

You should also note that SQL*Net features compression for same values in the same column, so even in conventional path inserts the network overhead is not as high as you might think.