Book Image

Pentaho 3.2 Data Integration: Beginner's Guide

Book Image

Pentaho 3.2 Data Integration: Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

Pentaho Data Integration (a.k.a. Kettle) is a full-featured open source ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) solution. Although PDI is a feature-rich tool, effectively capturing, manipulating, cleansing, transferring, and loading data can get complicated.This book is full of practical examples that will help you to take advantage of Pentaho Data Integration's graphical, drag-and-drop design environment. You will quickly get started with Pentaho Data Integration by following the step-by-step guidance in this book. The useful tips in this book will encourage you to exploit powerful features of Pentaho Data Integration and perform ETL operations with ease.Starting with the installation of the PDI software, this book will teach you all the key PDI concepts. Each chapter introduces new features, allowing you to gradually get involved with the tool. First, you will learn to work with plain files, and to do all kinds of data manipulation. Then, the book gives you a primer on databases and teaches you how to work with databases inside PDI. Not only that, you'll be given an introduction to data warehouse concepts and you will learn to load data in a data warehouse. After that, you will learn to implement simple and complex processes.Once you've learned all the basics, you will build a simple datamart that will serve to reinforce all the concepts learned through the book.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
Pentaho 3.2 Data Integration Beginner's Guide
Credits
Foreword
The Kettle Project
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Using named parameters and command-line arguments in transformations


As you know, transformations accept both arguments from the command line and named parameters. When you run a transformation from Spoon, you supply the values for arguments and named parameters in the transformation dialog window that shows up when you launch the execution. From a terminal window, you provide those values in the Pan command line.

In this chapter you learned to run a transformation embedded in a job. Here, the methods you have for supplying named parameters and arguments needed by the transformation are quite similar. From Spoon you supply the values in the job dialog window that shows up when you launch the job execution. From the terminal window you provide the values in the Kitchen command line.

Note

Whether you run a job from Spoon or from Kitchen, the named parameters and arguments you provide are unique and shared by the main job and all transformations called by that job. Each transformation, as well...