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

Chapter 5. Manipulating PDI Data and Metadata

In the previous chapters, you learned the basics of transforming data. This chapter expands your knowledge by teaching you a variety of essential features. Besides exploring new PDI steps for data manipulation, this chapter explains in detail a key resource in every process: the Select values step. The chapter also teaches you how to get system information and predefined variables to be used as part of the data flow. A special section is devoted to reading and writing XML and JSON structures.

In this chapter, you will learn about the following topics:

  • New ways to transform data
  • Understanding the Select values step and its different uses
  • Getting system information and predefined variables
  • Manipulating XML and JSON structures