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 – exploring the sample database


Let's explore the sample database:

  1. Open the transformation you just created.

  2. Right-click the connection in the Database connections list and select Explore in the contextual menu. The Database explorer on connection window opens.

  3. Expand the Tables node of the tree and select CUSTOMERS. This is how the explorer looks:

  4. Click on the Open SQL for [CUSTOMERS] option.

  5. The following SQL editor window appears:

  6. Modify the text in the window so that you have the following:

    	SELECT 
    	  CUSTOMERNUMBER
    	, CUSTOMERNAME
    	, CITY
    	, COUNTRY
    	 FROM CUSTOMERS
  7. Click on Execute. You will see the following result:

  8. Close the preview window (the window that tells the result of the execution) and the SQL editor window.

  9. Click on OK to close the database explorer window.

What just happened?

You explored the Pentaho sample database with the PDI Database explorer.

A brief word about SQL

Before explaining the details of the database explorer, it's worth giving an introduction to...