Book Image

Pentaho 3.2 Data Integration: Beginner's Guide

Book Image

Pentaho 3.2 Data Integration: Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

Pentaho Data Integration (a.k.a. Kettle) is a full-featured open source ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) solution. Although PDI is a feature-rich tool, effectively capturing, manipulating, cleansing, transferring, and loading data can get complicated.This book is full of practical examples that will help you to take advantage of Pentaho Data Integration's graphical, drag-and-drop design environment. You will quickly get started with Pentaho Data Integration by following the step-by-step guidance in this book. The useful tips in this book will encourage you to exploit powerful features of Pentaho Data Integration and perform ETL operations with ease.Starting with the installation of the PDI software, this book will teach you all the key PDI concepts. Each chapter introduces new features, allowing you to gradually get involved with the tool. First, you will learn to work with plain files, and to do all kinds of data manipulation. Then, the book gives you a primer on databases and teaches you how to work with databases inside PDI. Not only that, you'll be given an introduction to data warehouse concepts and you will learn to load data in a data warehouse. After that, you will learn to implement simple and complex processes.Once you've learned all the basics, you will build a simple datamart that will serve to reinforce all the concepts learned through the book.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
Pentaho 3.2 Data Integration Beginner's Guide
Credits
Foreword
The Kettle Project
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Time for action – installing PDI


These are the instructions to install Kettle, whatever your operating system.

The only prerequisite to install PDI is to have JRE 5.0 or higher installed. If you don't have it, please download it from http://www.javasoft.com/ and install it before proceeding. Once you have checked the prerequisite, follow these steps:

  1. From http://community.pentaho.com/sourceforge/ follow the link to Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle). Alternatively, go directly to the download page http://sourceforge.net/projects/pentaho/files/Data Integration.

  2. Choose the newest stable release. At this time, it is 3.2.0.

  3. Download the file that matches your platform. The preceding screenshot should help you.

  4. Unzip the downloaded file in a folder of your choice—C:/Kettle or /home/your_dir/kettle.

  5. If your system is Windows, you're done. Under UNIX-like environments, it's recommended that you make the scripts executable. Assuming that you chose Kettle as the installation folder, execute the following command:

    cd Kettle
    chmod +x *.sh
    

What just happened?

You have installed the tool in just a few minutes. Now you have all you need to start working.

Pop quiz – PDI prerequisites

Which of the following are mandatory to run PDI? You may choose more than one option.

  1. Kettle

  2. Pentaho BI platform

  3. JRE

  4. A database engine