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 – enhancing a films file by converting rows to columns


In this tutorial we will work with a file that contains list of all French movies ever made. Each movie is described through several rows. This is how it looks like:

...
Caché
Year: 2005
Director:Michael Haneke
Cast: Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou

Jean de Florette
Year: 1986
Genre: Historical drama
Director: Claude Berri
Produced by: Pierre Grunstein
Cast: Yves Montand, Gérard Depardieu, Daniel Auteuil

Le Ballon rouge
Year: 1956
Genre: Fantasy | Comedy | Drama
...

In order to process the information of the file, it would be better if the rows belonging to each movie were merged into a single row. Let's work on that.

  1. Download the file from the Packt website.

  2. Create a transformation and read the file with a Text file input step.

  3. In the Content tab of the Text file input step put : as separator. Also uncheck the Header and the No empty rows options.

  4. In the Fields tab enter two string fields—feature and description...