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

Outputting data to files


Creating and populating files with data is another common requirement in ETL processes. This section is meant to teach you how to do this with PDI.

Creating a simple file

As well as taking data from several types of files, PDI is capable of sending data to different types of output files. All you have to do is redirect the flow of data towards the proper output step.

As a starting point, we will demonstrate how to generate a plain text file. In this case, we will generate a file with dates:

  1. From the code in Chapter 2, Getting Started with Transformations open the Transformation that generates dates, date_range.ktr. Save it under a different name.
  1. Double-click the second Calculator step. We will use this step for adding more fields related to each date. Fill the grid as follows:

Adding fields in a Calculator step

  1. Expand the Output branch of the Steps tree, look for the Text file output step and drag it to the work area.
  2. Create a hop from the Calculator step to this new step...