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 – automating the loading of the sales datamart


Suppose that every day you want to update your sales datamart by adding the information about the sales for the day before. Let's do some modifications to the jobs and transformations you did so that the job can run automatically.

In order to test the changes, you'll have to change the date for your system. Set the current date as 2009-10-02.

  1. Create a new transformation.

  2. Drag to the canvas a Get system data step and fill it like here:

  3. With a Select values step, change the metadata of both fields: As type put String and as format, yyyy-MM-dd.

  4. Add a Set variables step and use the two fields to create two variables named START_DATE and END_DATE.

  5. Save the transformation in the same folder you saved the transformation that loads the fact.

  6. Modify the job that loads the fact so that instead of executing, the transformation that takes the range of dates from the command line executes this one. The job looks like this:

  7. Save it.

Now let's create...