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 – calculating flexible scores by using variables


Suppose that by the time you are creating the transformation, the weights for calculating the weighted average are unknown. You can modify the transformation by using parameters. Let's do it:

  1. Open the transformation of the previous section and save it with a new name.

  2. Press Ctrl+T to open the Transformation properties dialog window.

  3. Select the Parameters tab and fill it like here:

  4. Replace the JavaScript step by a new one and double-click it.

  5. Expand the Transform Scripts branch of the tree at the left of the window.

  6. Right-click the script named Script 1, select Rename, and type main as the new name.

  7. Position the mouse cursor over the editing window and right-click to bring up the following contextual menu:

  8. Select Add new to add the script, which will execute before your main code.

  9. A new script window appears. The script is added to the list of scripts under Transform Scripts.

  10. Bring up the contextual menu again, but this time clicking...