Throughout the book you learned, step by step, how to use PDI for accomplishing several kinds of tasks— reading from different kinds of sources, writing back to them, transforming data in several ways, loading data into databases, and even loading a full data mart. You already have the knowledge and the experience to do anything you want or you need with PDI from now on. However, PDI offers you some more features that may be useful for you as well. The following sections will introduce them and will guide you so that you know where to look for in case they want to put them into practice.
As you could see while learning Kettle, there is a large set of steps and job entries to choose from when designing jobs and transformations. The number rises above 200 between steps and entries! If you still feel like you need more, there are more options—plugins.
Kettle plugins are basically steps or job entries that you install separately. The available...