Book Image

Pentaho Data Integration 4 Cookbook

Book Image

Pentaho Data Integration 4 Cookbook

Overview of this book

Pentaho Data Integration (PDI, also called Kettle), one of the data integration tools leaders, is broadly used for all kind of data manipulation such as migrating data between applications or databases, exporting data from databases to flat files, data cleansing, and much more. Do you need quick solutions to the problems you face while using Kettle? Pentaho Data Integration 4 Cookbook explains Kettle features in detail through clear and practical recipes that you can quickly apply to your solutions. The recipes cover a broad range of topics including processing files, working with databases, understanding XML structures, integrating with Pentaho BI Suite, and more. Pentaho Data Integration 4 Cookbook shows you how to take advantage of all the aspects of Kettle through a set of practical recipes organized to find quick solutions to your needs. The initial chapters explain the details about working with databases, files, and XML structures. Then you will see different ways for searching data, executing and reusing jobs and transformations, and manipulating streams. Further, you will learn all the available options for integrating Kettle with other Pentaho tools. Pentaho Data Integration 4 Cookbook has plenty of recipes with easy step-by-step instructions to accomplish specific tasks. There are examples and code that are ready for adaptation to individual needs.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Pentaho Data Integration 4 Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Moving part of a transformation to a subtransformation


Suppose that you have a part of a transformation that you will like to use in another transformation. A quick way to do that would be to copy the set of steps and paste them into the other transformation, and then perform some modifications, for example, changing the names of the fields accordingly.

Now you realize that you need it in a third place. You do that again: copy, paste, and modify.

What if you notice that there was a bug in that part of the transformation? Or maybe you'd like to optimize something there? You would need to do that in three different places! This inconvenience is one of the reasons why you might like to move those steps to a common place - a subtransformation.

In this recipe, you will develop a subtransformation that receives the following two dates:

  1. A date of birth

  2. A reference date

The subtransformation will calculate how old a person was (or will be) at the reference date if the date of birth provided was theirs...