Often, while writing the change control documents, you might spend time looking up your design documents or notes, or even scanning through the navigation window on your designer, workflow manager, etc., to list down the objects that need to be promoted to the next environment. I am sure there might have been situations where you missed promoting a certain object, especially when you were modifying existing code, and your workflow failed when you ran it for the first time in the new environment.
Object Queries is a great tool in Informatica that can help you quickly get this information. You can write custom queries that run against the Informatica Metadata to retrieve and present the list of objects that match your criteria.
For example, I use the following Queries all the time:
List of objects I recently worked on (I can specify a date range)
Objects created by me (This can be customized to list objects within a folder and for a certain date range. I can look at all the objects I have created since I joined the project)
Recently updated objects (You can see the list of objects recently created or updated by anyone on the team. This helps if I am a Technical Lead reviewing my entire team's work)
Invalid objects (Can help in post-action impact analysis if you change an object, e.g., Source or Target definitions and would like to know what mappings or sessions were invalidated)
List of all the mappings, sessions, workflows, etc. in the project folder (This helps if I am an Integration Architect trying to get the number of objects to help me put together a process around managing the volume of objects or capacity planning)
Once you start using this tool, I am sure you will come up with a lot of scenarios or ideas to help you get the answers to your questions from the Informatica Metadata.
You can call this tool by selecting Queries... from the Tools menu. The options available in the tool depend on where you are accessing the tool. In other words, if you are calling the tool from within the Informatica Designer, you will notice that you can create queries for only the objects that the designer can create. For workflow related queries, you can call this tool from the Workflow Manager. I usually call this tool from the Repository Manager where it has the maximum capabilities.
Tip: This tool can also help you in writing your status reports, as you can query the Informatica Metadata and see which objects you had worked on.
(Please refer to the Repository Manager manual for additional guidelines on the usage of this tool)
