Informatica and Bulk Data API

tmarshall I'm aware of some customer using it. I'm not sure they are calling it from Informatica though. Are you having issues connecting to it? If so, which ones?

We are having trouble setting up Informatica to establish the connection. That is out current issue. The advice we are getting from informatica is to use a client certificate issued by a certification authority (with public/private keys) only to be used to authenticate the user. At the moment Lithium holds the certificate and their advice is they we get our own (so we have the private key) but we are unclear if this will work, which is why I'm reaching out the community.

If people are using a tool to connect via Bulk API did they have to use their own client certificate for it to work? We are also working the Informatica end to understand what other options we have to try and establish a connection. Thanks for your input. 

tmarshall I'm far from being an expert, so the below might not be correct!

I would first advise you to have a go without Informatica. Curl is probably the easiest way to start:

curl “https://eu.api.lithium.com/lsi-data/v1/data/export/community/<community_id>?fromDate=YYYYMMDDhhmm&to...” –H “client-id: <client-id>” –u “<token>:”

If your instance is not in EMEA, then the command will be:

curl “https://api.lithium.com/lsi-data/v1/data/export/community/<community_id>?fromDate=YYYYMMDDhhmm&toDat...” –H “client-id: <client-id>” –u “<token>:”

Use a tiny date range for your tests as you will see you will pull tons of data.

The command lines have been truncated, please refer to our Bulk API guide.

Once it's working fine, move to Informatica. I'm not sure why you would need to install a certificate as the calls are made using https. But, if Informatica insists of you installing a certificate, just get the Lithium one. Try this command line:

openssl s_client -connect eu-api.lithium.com:443

or, if in the US

openssl s_client -connect api.lithium.com:443

Cheers Oliver. We have been successful in setting up curl to generate the CSV file, so this part is done and we can increment by 1 day at time as we want the call to not time out as the files are pretty huge. Informatica is looking for a certificate in either of the 2 formats: CER or PEM. We will see what other options we can use, but will let the BI engineer know about the openssl option. Once we get this working will circle back on our approach as we might have to experiment with out own certificate. Thanks again for your feedback.

tmarshall 4 certificates ... are you sure your data are safe? lol

Hey OlivierS,

Thanks for the comment on the 4 security certs. Yeah, pretty crazy, but are using the 3 browser SSL certs plus the open SSL one. I guess Informatica is a  bit strict ;) Ha. I think the idea is they want to replicate the browser HTTPS for the API? Anywho, we are still working on the BULK API and a few more questions popped up and wanted to get another round of people's feedback. If you have time, take a look. I would appreciate your feedback on those questions too!

Cheers,

Tim

tmarshall I've seen your post. but I don't think I'm the best to answer. But if no one helps you, I will chime in ;-)