In the previous chapter, we discussed Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) a little, which is a part of the Pentaho stack. The Pentaho ecosystem enables management of voluminous data with ease and also provides increased velocity and variety. (It does not matter how many data sources or whichever data types…!) PDI delivers "analytics ready" data to end users much faster with a choice of visual tools that reduce the time and complexity of the data analytics life cycle. PDI comes as a standalone Community Edition (CE) as well as bundled with Pentaho BA Server Enterprise Edition (EE).
PDI has some inherent advantages such as beautiful orchestration and integration for all data stores using its very powerful GUI. It has an adaptive Big Data Layer supporting almost any Big Data source with reduced complexity. In this way, data has become abstract from analytics giving a competitive advantage. Its simple drag-and-drop design supports a rich set of mapping objects, including...