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 – gathering progress and merging all together


Suppose that you delivered the Excel files you generated in the Assigning tasks by filtering priorities tutorial earlier in the chapter. You gave the b_bouchard.xls to Benjamin Bouchard, the senior programmer. You also gave the other Excel file to a project leader who is going to assign the tasks to different programmers. Now they are giving you back the worksheets, with a new column indicating the progress of the development. In the case of the shared file, there is also a column with the name of the programmer who is working on every issue. Your task is now to unify those sheets.

Here is what the Excel files look like:

  1. Create a new transformation.

  2. Drag an Excel Input step to the canvas and read one of the files.

  3. Add a Filter row step to keep only the rows where the progress is not null, that is, the rows belonging to tasks whose development has been started.

  4. After the filter, add a Sort rows step, and configure it to order the fields...