Book Image

Pentaho Data Integration Beginner's Guide - Second Edition - Second Edition

By : María Carina Roldán
Book Image

Pentaho Data Integration Beginner's Guide - Second Edition - Second Edition

By: María Carina Roldán

Overview of this book

Capturing, manipulating, cleansing, transferring, and loading data effectively are the prime requirements in every IT organization. Achieving these tasks require people devoted to developing extensive software programs, or investing in ETL or data integration tools that can simplify this work. Pentaho Data Integration is a full-featured open source ETL solution that allows you to meet these requirements. Pentaho Data Integration has an intuitive, graphical, drag-and-drop design environment and its ETL capabilities are powerful. However, getting started with Pentaho Data Integration can be difficult or confusing. "Pentaho Data Integration Beginner's Guide - Second Edition" provides the guidance needed to overcome that difficulty, covering all the possible key features of Pentaho Data Integration. "Pentaho Data Integration Beginner's Guide - Second Edition" starts with the installation of Pentaho Data Integration software and then moves on to cover all the key Pentaho Data Integration concepts. Each chapter introduces new features, allowing you to gradually get involved with the tool. First, you will learn to do all kinds of data manipulation and work with plain files. Then, the book gives you a primer on databases and teaches you how to work with databases inside Pentaho Data Integration. Moreover, you will be introduced to data warehouse concepts and you will learn how to load data in a data warehouse. After that, you will learn to implement simple and complex processes. Finally, you will have the opportunity of applying and reinforcing all the learned concepts through the implementation of a simple datamart. With "Pentaho Data Integration Beginner's Guide - Second Edition", you will learn everything you need to know in order to meet your data manipulation requirements.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
Pentaho Data Integration Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Best Practices
Index

Exploring the sales datamart


In Chapter 9, Performing Advanced Operations with Databases, you were introduced to star schemas. In a few words, a star schema consists of a central table known as the fact table, surrounded by dimension tables. While the fact has indicators of your business, for example, sales in dollars, the dimensions have descriptive information about the attributes of your business such as time, customers, and products.

A star that addresses a specific department's needs or that is built for use by a particular group of users is called a datamart. You could have datamarts focused on customer relationship management, inventory, human resources management, budget, and more. In this chapter, you will load a datamart focused on sales.

Sometimes the term "datamart" is confused with "data warehouse". However, datamarts and data warehouses are not the same.

Note

The main difference between datamarts and data warehouses is that data warehouses address the needs of the whole organization...