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 – generating files with top scores


In this tutorial, you will read the examination global file and generate four files—one for each particular skill. The files will contain the top 10 scores for each skill. The scores will not be the original, but converted to a scale with values in the range 0-5.

Note

As you must be already quite confident with PDI, some explanations in this section will not have the full details. On the contrary, the general explanation will be focused on the structure of the jobs and transformations.

  1. Create a new transformation and save it in the transformations folder under the name top_scores.ktr.

  2. Use a Text file input step to read the global examination file generated in the previous tutorial.

  3. After the Text file input step, add the following steps and link them in the same order:

    • A Select values step to remove the unused fields—file_processed and process_date.

    • A Split Fields to split the name of the students in two—name and last name.

    • A Formula step to convert...