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

Integrating PDI and the Pentaho BI suite


In this book you learned to use PDI standalone, but as mentioned in the first chapter, it is possible to use it integrated with the rest of the suite. There are a couple of options for doing so.

PDI as a process action

In Chapter 1 you were introduced to the Pentaho platform. Everything in the Pentaho platform is made by action sequences. An action sequence is, as its name suggests, a sequence of atomic actions that together accomplish small business processes.

Look at the following sample with regard to the Puzzle business:

Consider that you regularly receive updated price lists (one for each manufacturer) and you drop the files in a given folder. When you decide to hike the prices, you process one of those files and get a web-based report with the updated prices. You can implement that process with an action sequence.

There are four atomic actions in this sequence. You already know how to do the first and third actions (building the list of available...