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 (23 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Designing and previewing transformations


In the previous chapter, you created a simple Transformation, previewed the data, and also ran the Transformation. That allowed you to get your first contact with the PDI graphical designer. In this section, you will become more familiar with the editing features, experiment the Preview option in detail, and deal with errors that may appear as you develop and test a Transformation.

Getting familiar with editing features

Editing transformations with Spoon can be very time-consuming if you're not familiar with the editing facilities that the software offers. In this section, you will learn a bit more about three editing features that you already faced in the previous chapter:

  • Using the mouseover assistance toolbar
  • Adding steps and creating hops in different ways
  • Working with grids

Using the mouseover assistance toolbar

The mouseover assistance toolbar, as shown in the following screenshot, is a tiny toolbar that assists you when you position the mouse cursor...