Book Image

Pentaho Data Integration Beginner's Guide - Second Edition - Second Edition

By : María Carina Roldán
Book Image

Pentaho Data Integration Beginner's Guide - Second Edition - Second Edition

By: María Carina Roldán

Overview of this book

Capturing, manipulating, cleansing, transferring, and loading data effectively are the prime requirements in every IT organization. Achieving these tasks require people devoted to developing extensive software programs, or investing in ETL or data integration tools that can simplify this work. Pentaho Data Integration is a full-featured open source ETL solution that allows you to meet these requirements. Pentaho Data Integration has an intuitive, graphical, drag-and-drop design environment and its ETL capabilities are powerful. However, getting started with Pentaho Data Integration can be difficult or confusing. "Pentaho Data Integration Beginner's Guide - Second Edition" provides the guidance needed to overcome that difficulty, covering all the possible key features of Pentaho Data Integration. "Pentaho Data Integration Beginner's Guide - Second Edition" starts with the installation of Pentaho Data Integration software and then moves on to cover all the key Pentaho Data Integration concepts. Each chapter introduces new features, allowing you to gradually get involved with the tool. First, you will learn to do all kinds of data manipulation and work with plain files. Then, the book gives you a primer on databases and teaches you how to work with databases inside Pentaho Data Integration. Moreover, you will be introduced to data warehouse concepts and you will learn how to load data in a data warehouse. After that, you will learn to implement simple and complex processes. Finally, you will have the opportunity of applying and reinforcing all the learned concepts through the implementation of a simple datamart. With "Pentaho Data Integration Beginner's Guide - Second Edition", you will learn everything you need to know in order to meet your data manipulation requirements.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
Pentaho Data Integration Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Best Practices
Index

Pentaho Data Integration and Pentaho BI Suite


Before introducing PDI, let’s talk about Pentaho BI Suite. The Pentaho Business Intelligence Suite is a collection of software applications intended to create and deliver solutions for decision making. The main functional areas covered by the suite are:

  • Analysis: The analysis engine serves multidimensional analysis. It’s provided by the Mondrian OLAP server.

  • Reporting: The reporting engine allows designing, creating, and distributing reports in various known formats (HTML, PDF, and so on), from different kinds of sources.

  • Data Mining: Data mining is used for running data through algorithms in order to understand the business and do predictive analysis. Data mining is possible thanks to the Weka Project.

  • Dashboards: Dashboards are used to monitor and analyze Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The Community Dashboard Framework (CDF), a plugin developed by the community and integrated in the Pentaho BI Suite, allows the creation of interesting dashboards including charts, reports, analysis views, and other Pentaho content, without much effort.

  • Data Integration: Data integration is used to integrate scattered information from different sources (applications, databases, files, and so on), and make the integrated information available to the final user. Pentaho Data Integration—the tool that we will learn to use throughout the book—is the engine that provides this functionality.

All of this functionality can be used standalone but also integrated. In order to run analysis, reports, and so on, integrated as a suite, you have to use the Pentaho BI Platform. The platform has a solution engine, and offers critical services, for example, authentication, scheduling, security, and web services.

This set of software and services form a complete BI Platform, which makes Pentaho Suite the world’s leading open source Business Intelligence Suite.