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

Manipulating simple fields


As already said, transformations deal with the data flow. As data goes through the PDI steps of a Transformation, it is manipulated or transformed in different ways. You already experimented with some possibilities. In this section, you will learn in detail how to transform different data according to your needs.

Working with strings

For any string, there are many transformations that you can apply to it, for example:

  • Extracting part of the string
  • Removing leading spaces
  • Converting to uppercase

PDI offers several ways to do this. It's also common to find more than one step that can be used for the same purpose. The following table summarizes the most common PDI steps used to operate on String fields:

PDI step

Step description

Calculator

With the Calculator step, it is possible to apply several transformations on strings including converting to upper and lowercase and removing special characters.

You can also use the Calculator to concatenate two or three strings using the...