Book Image

Pentaho Data Integration 4 Cookbook

Book Image

Pentaho Data Integration 4 Cookbook

Overview of this book

Pentaho Data Integration (PDI, also called Kettle), one of the data integration tools leaders, is broadly used for all kind of data manipulation such as migrating data between applications or databases, exporting data from databases to flat files, data cleansing, and much more. Do you need quick solutions to the problems you face while using Kettle? Pentaho Data Integration 4 Cookbook explains Kettle features in detail through clear and practical recipes that you can quickly apply to your solutions. The recipes cover a broad range of topics including processing files, working with databases, understanding XML structures, integrating with Pentaho BI Suite, and more. Pentaho Data Integration 4 Cookbook shows you how to take advantage of all the aspects of Kettle through a set of practical recipes organized to find quick solutions to your needs. The initial chapters explain the details about working with databases, files, and XML structures. Then you will see different ways for searching data, executing and reusing jobs and transformations, and manipulating streams. Further, you will learn all the available options for integrating Kettle with other Pentaho tools. Pentaho Data Integration 4 Cookbook has plenty of recipes with easy step-by-step instructions to accomplish specific tasks. There are examples and code that are ready for adaptation to individual needs.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Pentaho Data Integration 4 Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Programming custom functionality


In Kettle, you have a lot of functionality provided by the built-in steps, but if that is not enough for you, there is a step named User Defined Java Class (UDJC for short) where you can program custom functionality with Java code. In this way, you can accomplish complex tasks, access Java libraries, and even access the Kettle API. The code you type into this step is compiled once and executed at runtime for each passing row.

Let's create a simple example of the use of the UDJC step. Assume that you have a text file containing sentences; you want to count the words in each row and split the flow of data into two streams depending on the number of words per sentence.

Note that in order to develop a more interesting exercise, we added some extra considerations, as follows:

  • There are several characters as separators, not only the blank spaces

  • Sometimes, you can have a sequence of separators together

  • Some sentences have a special character at the end, and some don...