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)

Avoiding coding using purpose-built steps


You saw through the exercises how powerful the JavaScript and Java Class steps are to help you in your transformations. In older versions of PDI, coding JavaScript was the only means you had for specific tasks. In the latest releases of PDI, actual steps appeared that eliminate the need to code in many cases. Here you have some examples of these steps:

  • Formula step: Before the appearance of this step, there were a lot of functions, such as the right or left text function, that you could solve only with JavaScript
  • Analytic Query: This step offers a way to retrieve information from rows before or after the current row
  • Split field into rows: This step is used to create several rows from a single string value
  • Add value fields changing sequence: Similar to the Add sequence step, but the sequence value resets each time a value in the list of specified fields changes

Other steps have enhanced their capabilities. For example, the number of available calculations...