Book Image

Learning Pentaho Data Integration 8 CE - Third Edition

By : Carina Roldán
Book Image

Learning Pentaho Data Integration 8 CE - Third Edition

By: Carina Roldán

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)

Understanding PDI data and metadata

By now, you have already created three transformations and must have an idea of what a dataset is, the kind of data types that PDI supports, and how data is modified as it goes through the path of steps and hops. This section will provide you with a deeper understanding of these concepts:

  • We will give formal definitions for PDI basic terminology related to data and metadata
  • We will also give you a practical list of steps that will expand your toolbox for Transforming data

Understanding the PDI rowset

Transformation deal with datasets or rowsets, that is, rows of data with a predefined metadata. The metadata tells us about the structure of data, that is, the list of fields as well...