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)

Introducing jobs


In this section, we will introduce PDI jobs. First, we will give some basic definitions, and then we will design and run a very simple Job.

Learning the basics about jobs

A Job is an entity made of Job entries linked by hops. These entries and hops build paths, telling the engine the sequence of individual tasks to accomplish. Therefore, we say that a Job is task oriented.

Graphically, Job entries are represented with small boxes, whereas hops are represented with directional arrows, as depicted in the following sample:

 Sample Job

The unit of execution inside a Job is a Job entry. Job Entries are grouped into categories according to their purpose, which can be transferring files, creating folders, sending emails, running scripts, and more. There is a main category named General, which contains many of the most used entries. In particular, this category includes the START Job entry, mandatory in every Job, as you can observe in the preceding image.

A hop inside a Job is a graphical...