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

Chapter 10. Creating Basic Task Flows

So far you have been working with data. You got data from a file, a sheet, or a database, transformed it somehow, and sent it back to some file or table in a database. You did it by using PDI transformations. A PDI transformation does not run in isolation. Usually, it is embedded in a bigger process. Here are some examples:

  • Download a file, clean it, load the information of the file in a database, and fill an audit file with the result of the operation.

  • Generate a daily report and transfer the report to a shared repository.

  • Update a datawarehouse. If something goes wrong, notify the administrator by e-mail.

All these examples are typical processes of which a transformation is only a piece. These types of processes can be implemented by PDI Jobs. In this chapter, you will learn to build basic jobs. These are the topics that will be covered:

  • Introduction to jobs

  • Executing tasks depending upon conditions