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

Reading data from files


Despite being the most primitive format used to store data, files are still broadly used and they exist in several formats, such as fixed width, comma-separated values, spreadsheets, or even free format files. Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) has the ability to read data from all kinds of files. In this section, let's see how to use PDI to get data from these files.

Reading a simple file

In this section, you will learn to read one of the most common input sources, plain files.

For demonstration purposes, we will use a simplified version of sales_data.csv that comes with the PDI bundle. Our sample file looks as follows:

ORDERDATE,ORDERNUMBER,ORDERLINENUMBER,PRODUCTCODE,PRODUCTLINE,QUANTITYORDERED,PRICEEACH,SALES
2/20/2004 0:00 ,10223,10,S24_4278 ,Planes ,23,74.62,1716.26
11/21/2004 0:00,10337,3,S18_4027 ,Classic Cars ,36,100 ,5679.36
6/16/2003 0:00 ,10131,2,S700_4002,Planes ,26,85.13,2213.38
7/6/2004 0:00 ,10266,5,S18_1984 ,Classic Cars ,49,100 ,6203.4
10/16/2004 0:00,10310...