Book Image

Learning Pentaho Data Integration 8 CE - Third Edition

Book Image

Learning Pentaho Data Integration 8 CE - Third Edition

Overview of this book

Pentaho Data Integration(PDI) is an intuitive and graphical environment packed with drag-and-drop design and powerful Extract-Tranform-Load (ETL) capabilities. This book shows and explains the new interactive features of Spoon, the revamped look and feel, and the newest features of the tool including transformations and jobs Executors and the invaluable Metadata Injection capability. We begin with the installation of PDI software and then move on to cover all the key PDI concepts. Each of the chapter introduces new features, enabling you to gradually get practicing with the tool. First, you will learn to do all kind of data manipulation and work with simple plain files. Then, the book teaches you how you can work with relational databases inside PDI. Moreover, you will be given a primer on data warehouse concepts and you will learn how to load data in a data warehouse. During the course of this book, you will be familiarized with its intuitive, graphical and drag-and-drop design environment. By the end of this book, you will learn everything you need to know in order to meet your data manipulation requirements. Besides, your will be given best practices and advises for designing and deploying your projects.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Connecting to a database and exploring its content


Before interacting with a database in PDI, you need to prepare the environment. In the next sections, you will learn to create a connection to a database and explore the database from within Spoon.

For demonstration purposes, we will work with PostgreSQL, but with minor changes, you should be able to reproduce the same exercises with any other RDBMS engine. Also, the examples will be based on Pagila. Pagila is the PostgreSQL version of the Sakila database and represents the business processes of a DVD rental store.

Connecting with Relational Database Management Systems

PDI has the ability to connect to both commercial RDBMS such as Oracle or MS SQL Server, and free RDBMS such as MySQL or PostgreSQL. In order to interact with a particular database, you have to define a connection to it. A PDI database connection describes all the parameters needed to connect PDI to a database. To create a connection, you must give the connection a name and at...