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

Introducing the Steel Wheels sample database


As you were told in the first chapter, there is a Pentaho Demo that includes data for a fictional store named Steel Wheels and you can download it from the Internet. This data is stored in a database that is going to be the starting point for you to learn how to work with databases in PDI.Before beginning to work on databases, let's briefly introduce the Steel Wheels database along with some database definitions.

A relational database is a collection of items stored in tables. Typically, all items stored in a table belong to a particular type of data. The following table lists some of the tables in the Steel Wheels database:

Table

Content

CUSTOMERS

Steel Wheels' customers

EMPLOYEES

Steel Wheels' employees

PRODUCTS

Products sold by Steel Wheels

OFFICES

Steel Wheels' offices

ORDERS

Information about sales orders

ORDERDETAILS

Details about the sales orders

The items stored in the tables represent an entity or a concept...