Book Image

Getting Started with Talend Open Studio for Data Integration

By : Jonathan Bowen
Book Image

Getting Started with Talend Open Studio for Data Integration

By: Jonathan Bowen

Overview of this book

Talend Open Studio for Data Integration (TOS) is an open source graphical development environment for creating custom integrations between systems. It comes with over 600 pre-built connectors that make it quick and easy to connect databases, transform files, load data, move, copy and rename files and connect individual components in order to define complex integration processes. "Getting Started with Talend Open Studio for Data Integration" illustrates common uses and scenarios in a simple, practical manner and, building on knowledge as the book progresses, works towards more complex integration solutions. TOS is a code generator and so does a lot of the "heavy lifting"ù for you. As such, it is a suitable tool for experienced developers and non-developers alike. You'll start by learning how to construct some common integrations tasks ñ transforming files and extracting data from a database, for example. These building blocks form a "toolkit"ù of techniques that you will learn how to apply in many different situations. By the end of the book, once complex integrations will appear easy and you will be your organization's integration expert! Best of all, TOS makes integrating systems fun!
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Getting Started with Talend Open Studio for Data Integration
Credits
Foreword
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Normalizing and denormalizing data


Database normalization is the process whereby a database schema is designed to reduce data duplication and redundancy. If a database is not designed with normalization principles in mind, it can:

  • Get overly large, due to duplicated data

  • Make data maintenance difficult or give rise to data integrity issues if the same data values reside in multiple tables

While we are not directly concerned with database schema design in this chapter, our next two examples look at processing operations borne from the same principles as database normalization, so readers who aren't familiar with the concepts may wish to read some introductory material first. For a good primer on database normalization, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization .

Data normalization

Our first example shows how we can normalize data. Suppose we have a data file that has two fields: product_id and categories. A product can belong to more than one category and the category values are...