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

Summary


In this chapter you learned how to get data from files and put data back into files. Specifically, you learned how to:

  • Get data from plain files and also from XML files

  • Put data into text files and Excel files

  • Get information from the operating system such as command-line arguments and system date

We also discussed the following:

  • The main PDI terminology related to data, for example datasets, data types, and streams

  • The Select values step, a commonly used step for selecting, reordering, removing and changing data

  • How and when to use Kettle variables

  • How to run transformations from a terminal with the Pan command

Now that you know how to get data into a transformation, you are ready to start manipulating data. This is going to happen in the next chapter.