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

Knowing the basics about Kettle variables


In this chapter, you used the string ${Internal.Entry.Current.Directory} to identify the folder where the current Job was saved. You also used the string ${MY_FOLDER} to define the name of the folder to be created. Both strings, ${Internal.Entry.Current.Directory} and ${MY_FOLDER}, are Kettle variables, that is, keywords linked to a value. You use the name of a variable, and when the Transformation runs, the name of the variable is replaced by its value.

The first of these two variables is an environment variable, and it is not the only one available. Other known environment variables are: ${user.home}, ${java.io.tmpdir}, and ${java.home}. All these variables, whose values are auto-populated by PDI, are ready to be used any time you need, both in jobs and transformations. The second string, ${MY_FOLDER}, is a variable you defined in a Job directly in the entry that would use it, the Create a folder entry. That is not the only way to create user-defined...