▶Book Description
Pentaho Data Integration(PDI) is an intuitive and graphical environment packed with drag-and-drop design and powerful Extract-Tranform-Load (ETL) capabilities. This book shows and explains the new interactive features of Spoon, the revamped look and feel, and the newest features of the tool including transformations and jobs Executors and the invaluable Metadata Injection capability.
We begin with the installation of PDI software and then move on to cover all the key PDI concepts. Each of the chapter introduces new features, enabling you to gradually get practicing with the tool. First, you will learn to do all kind of data manipulation and work with simple plain files. Then, the book teaches you how you can work with relational databases inside PDI. Moreover, you will be given a primer on data warehouse concepts and you will learn how to load data in a data warehouse. During the course of this book, you will be familiarized with its intuitive, graphical and drag-and-drop design environment.
By the end of this book, you will learn everything you need to know in order to meet your data manipulation requirements. Besides, your will be given best practices and advises for designing and deploying your projects.
▶What You Will Learn
⦁ Explore the features and capabilities of Pentaho Data Integration 8 Community Edition
⦁ Install and get started with PDI
⦁ Learn the ins and outs of Spoon, the graphical designer tool
⦁ Learn to get data from all kind of data sources, such as plain files, Excel spreadsheets, databases, and XML files
⦁ Use Pentaho Data Integration to perform CRUD (create, read, update, and delete) operations on relationaldatabases
⦁ Populate a data mart with Pentaho Data Integration
⦁ Use Pentaho Data Integration to organize files and folders, run daily processes, deal with errors, and more
▶Key Features
⦁ Manipulate your data by exploring, transforming, validating, and integrating it using Pentaho Data Integration 8 CE
⦁ A comprehensive guide exploring the features of Pentaho Data Integration 8 CE
⦁ Connect to any database engine, explore the databases, and perform all kind of operations on relational databases
▶Who This Book Is For
This book is a must-have for software developers, business intelligence analysts, IT students, or anyone involved or interested in developing ETL solutions. If you plan on using Pentaho Data Integration for doing any data manipulation task, this book will help you as well. This book is also a good starting point for data warehouse designers, architects, or anyone who is responsible for data warehouse projects and needs to load data into them.
▶What this book covers
⦁ Chapter 1, Getting Started with Pentaho Data Integration, serves as an introduction to PDI, presenting the tool. This chapter includes instructions for installing PDI and gives you the opportunity to play with the graphical designer (Spoon).
⦁ Chapter 2, Getting Started with Transformations, explains the fundamentals of working with transformations, including learning the simplest ways of transforming data and getting familiar with the process of designing, debugging, and testing a Transformation. This chapter also explains the basics of handling errors.
⦁ Chapter 3, Creating Basic Task Flows, serves as an introduction to the processes in PDI. Through the creation of simple Jobs, you will learn what Jobs are and what they are used for.
⦁ Chapter 4, Reading and Writing Files, explains how to get data from several files formats as spreadsheets, CSV files, and more. It also explains how to save data in the same kind of formats.
⦁ Chapter 5, Manipulating PDI Data and Metadata, expands the set of operations learned in the previous chapters. Besides exploring new PDI steps for data manipulation, this chapter introduces the Select Value step for manipulating metadata. It also explains how to get system information and predefined variables for being used as part of the data flow. The chapter also explains how to read and write XML and JSON structures.
⦁ Chapter 6, Controlling the Flow of Data, explains different options that PDI offers to deal with more than one stream of data: It explains how to combine and split flows of data, filter data and more.
⦁ Chapter 7, Cleansing, Validating, and Fixing Data, offers different ways for cleansing data, and also for dealing with invalid data, either by discarding it or by fixing it.
⦁ Chapter 8, Manipulating Data by Coding, explains how JavaScript and Java coding can help in the treatment of data. It shows why you may need to code inside PDI, and explains in detail how to do it.
⦁ Chapter 9, Transforming the Dataset, explains techniques for transforming the dataset as a whole; for example, aggregating data or normalizing pivoted tables.
⦁ Chapter 10, Performing Basic Operations with Databases, explains how to use PDI to work with databases. The list of topics in this chapter includes connecting to a database, previewing and getting data. It also covers other basic operations as inserting, looking up for data, and more.
⦁ Chapter 11, Loading Data Marts with PDI, explains the details about loading simple data marts. It shows how to load common types of dimensions (SCD, Junk, Time, and so on) and also different types of fact tables.
⦁ Chapter 12, Creating Portable and Reusable Transformations, explains several techniques for creating versatile transformations that can be used and reused in different scenarios or with different sets of data.
⦁ Chapter 13, Implementing Metadata Injection, explains a powerful feature of PDI, which is basically about injecting metadata into a template Transformation at runtime. Pentaho team has put in huge effort to highly support this feature in the latest PDI versions, so it's worth to explain in detail how this feature works.
⦁ Chapter 14, Creating Advanced Jobs, explains techniques for creating complex processes; for example, iterating over Jobs or manipulating lists of files for different purposes.
⦁ Chapter 15, Launching Transformations and Jobs from the Command Line, is a reference not only for running transformations from a Terminal, but also for dealing with the output of the executions.
⦁ Chapter 16, Best Practices for Designing and Deploying a PDI Project, covers the setup of a new project and also the best practices that make it easier to develop, maintain, and deploy a project in different environments.
