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 – getting data from an XML file with information about countries


In this tutorial you will build an Excel file with basic information about countries. The source will be an XML file that you can download from the Packt website.

  1. If you work under Windows, open the kettle.properties file located in the C:/Documents and Settings/yourself/.kettle folder and add the following line:

    LABSOUTPUT=c:/pdi_files/output

    On the other hand, if you work under Linux (or similar), open the kettle.properties file located in the /home/yourself/.kettle folder and add the following line:

    LABSOUTPUT=/home/yourself/pdi_files/output
  2. Make sure that the directory specified in kettle.properties exists.

  3. Save the file.

  4. Restart Spoon.

  5. Create a new transformation.

  6. Give a name to the transformation and save it in the same directory you have all the other transformations.

  7. From the Packt website, download the resources folder containing a file named countries.xml. Save the folder in your working directory. For example...