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

Deciding between the use of a command-line argument and a named parameter


Both command-line arguments and named parameters are means for creating more flexible jobs and transformations. The following table summarizes the differences and reasons for using one or the other. In the first column, the word argument refers to the external value you will use in your job or transformation. That argument could be implemented as a named parameter or as a command-line argument.

Situation

Solution using named parameters

Solution using arguments

It is desirable to have a default for the argument.

Named parameters are perfect in this case. You provide default values at the time you define them.

Before using the command-line argument, you have to evaluate if it was provided in the command line. If not, you have to set the default value at that moment.

The argument is mandatory.

You don't have means to determine if the user provided a value for the named parameter.

To know if the user provided a...