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 – loading dimensions for the sales datamart


In this tutorial, you will load each dimension for the sales datamart and enclose them into a single job. Before starting, check the following things:

  • Check that the database engine is up and that both the js and the js_dw databases are accessible from PDI.

  • If your time dimension table, lk_time, has data, truncate the table. You may do it by using the Truncate table [lk_time] option in the database explorer.

Tip

You may reuse the js_dw database in which you have been loading data in previous chapters. There is no problem with that. However, creating a whole new database is preferred so that you can see how the entire process works.

The explanation will be focused on the general process. For details of creating a transformation that loads a particular type of dimension, please refer to Chapter 9. You can also download the full material for this chapter where the transformations and jobs are ready to browse and try.

  1. Create a new transformation...