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

Time for action – generating a range of dates and inspecting the data as it is being created


In this section, you will generate a rowset with one row by date in a date range.

Tip

As you progress, feel free to preview the data that is being generated even if you're not told to do so. This will help you understand what is going on. Testing each step as you move forward makes it easier to debug and craft a functional transformation.

  1. Create a new transformation.

  2. From the Input group of steps, drag to the canvas a Generate Rows step.

  3. Double-click on the step and fill in the grid as shown in the following screenshot:

  4. Note that you have to change the default value for the Limit textbox. Close the window.

  5. From the Transform category of steps, add a Calculator step, and create a hop that goes from the Generate Rows step to this one.

  6. Double-click on the Calculator step and add a field named diff_dates as the difference between end_date and start_date. That is, configure it exactly the same way as you did...