Book Image

Learning Pentaho Data Integration 8 CE - Third Edition

Book Image

Learning Pentaho Data Integration 8 CE - Third Edition

Overview of this book

Pentaho Data Integration(PDI) is an intuitive and graphical environment packed with drag-and-drop design and powerful Extract-Tranform-Load (ETL) capabilities. This book shows and explains the new interactive features of Spoon, the revamped look and feel, and the newest features of the tool including transformations and jobs Executors and the invaluable Metadata Injection capability. We begin with the installation of PDI software and then move on to cover all the key PDI concepts. Each of the chapter introduces new features, enabling you to gradually get practicing with the tool. First, you will learn to do all kind of data manipulation and work with simple plain files. Then, the book teaches you how you can work with relational databases inside PDI. Moreover, you will be given a primer on data warehouse concepts and you will learn how to load data in a data warehouse. During the course of this book, you will be familiarized with its intuitive, graphical and drag-and-drop design environment. By the end of this book, you will learn everything you need to know in order to meet your data manipulation requirements. Besides, your will be given best practices and advises for designing and deploying your projects.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Loading fact tables


Fact tables contain the central information of star models. In this section, you will learn to load these kinds of tables. This is the list of topics covered:

  • Introducing different kinds of fact tables
  • Translating business keys into surrogate keys
  • Loading fact tables with PDI

Learning the basics about fact tables

As explained in the introduction, fact tables are the central tables in a dimensional model. While the dimensions serve to group, filter, and describe data, the fact tables contain the measures of the business. There are basically two types of fact tables:

  • Cumulative: They describe what happened over a period of time—a Sales fact table is a typical example of this. The measures for these types of fact tables are mostly additive, that is, measures that can be added across all dimensions.
  • Snapshots: They describe the activity of a business process, with pictures taken at a given instant of time. Examples of this kind of fact table are postal tracking systems, order processing...