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

Time for action – updating a file with news about examinations by setting a variable with the name of the file


The transformation in the Time for action from Chapter 2 that we just talked about reads a file provided by a professor, simply by taking the name of the file from the command line, and appends the file to the global one. Let's enhance that work.

  1. Copy the examination files you used in Chapter 2 to the input files and folder defined in your kettle.properties file. If you don't have them, download them from the Packt website.

  2. Open Spoon and create a new transformation.

  3. Use a Get System Info step to get the first command-line argument. Name the field as filename.

  4. Add a Filter rows step and create a hop from the Get System Info step to this step.

  5. From the Flow category drag an Abort step to the canvas, and from the Job category of steps drag a Set Variables step.

  6. From the Filter rows step, create two hops—one to the Abort step and the other to the Set Variables step. Double-click the Abort...