Book Image

Talend Open Studio Cookbook

By : Rick Barton
Book Image

Talend Open Studio Cookbook

By: Rick Barton

Overview of this book

Data integration is a key component of an organization's technical strategy, yet historically the tools have been very expensive. Talend Open Studio is the world's leading open source data integration product and has played a huge part in making open source data integration a popular choice for businesses worldwide.This book is a welcome addition to the small but growing library of Talend Open Studio resources. From working with schemas to creating and validating test data, to scheduling your Talend code, you will get acquainted with the various Talend database handling techniques. Each recipe is designed to provide the key learning point in a short, simple and effective manner.This comprehensive guide provides practical exercises that cover all areas of the Talend development lifecycle including development, testing, debugging and deployment. The book delivers design patterns, hints, tips, and advice in a series of short and focused exercises that can be approached as a reference for more seasoned developers or as a series of useful learning tutorials for the beginner.The book covers the basics in terms of schema usage and mappings, along with dedicated sections that will allow you to get more from tMap, files, databases and XML. Geared towards the whole lifecycle, the Talend Open Studio Cookbook shows readers great ways to handle everyday tasks, and provides an insight into all areas of a development cycle including coding, testing, and debugging of code to provide start-to-finish coverage of the product.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Talend Open Studio Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Common Type Conversions
Index

Understanding implicit context loading


The implicit context load method as described in the recipe Using implicit context load to load contexts in Chapter 6, Managing Context Variables.

Pros

The implicit context load technique is centrally managed, thus ensuring consistent use across a project. Developers do not need to remember to set context variables, because they will be set automatically.

The use of external files is good practice for managing contexts, as they are less likely to be overwritten during deployment.

Cons

This method provides the option to fail if a context variable is not present or does not contain data, which is great for validating your parameters. Unfortunately this option checks against the whole context of a job, including context variables that are only used locally within the job and will fail if the local job variables are not present in the external file. Thus we have a choice; we can add single use variables to our shared context, potentially making it very messy, or we have to turn off the option to fail the job if we find problems with the context variables, thus removing a level of validation that we may prefer to keep.

Conclusion

The implicit context load method provides a consistent method for loading contexts and requires the least effort to set up and maintain, but it does suffer from a lack of fine grain since the context variables are applied to every job in a project.

It is good for projects where there is high degree of commonality in the processing and the resources.