Pentaho Data Integration Beginner’s Guide, 2nd Edition

Get up and running with the Pentaho Data Integration tool using this hands-on, easy-to-read guide

Overview

• Manipulate your data by exploring, transforming, validating, and integrating it
• Learn to migrate data between applications
• Explore several features of Pentaho Data Integration 5.0
• Connect to any database engine, explore the databases, and perform all kind of operations on databases

In Detail

Capturing, manipulating, cleansing, transferring, and loading data effectively are the prime requirements in every IT organization. Achieving these tasks require people devoted to developing extensive software programs, or investing in ETL or data integration tools that can simplify this work.

Pentaho Data Integration is a full-featured open source ETL solution that allows you to meet these requirements. Pentaho Data Integration has an intuitive, graphical, drag-and-drop design environment and its ETL capabilities are powerful. However, getting started with Pentaho Data Integration can be difficult or confusing.

“Pentaho Data Integration Beginner’s Guide, Second Edition” provides the guidance needed to overcome that difficulty, covering all the possible key features of Pentaho Data Integration.

“Pentaho Data Integration Beginner’s Guide, Second Edition” starts with the installation of Pentaho Data Integration software and then moves on to cover all the key Pentaho Data Integration concepts. Each chapter introduces new features, allowing you to gradually get involved with the tool. First, you will learn to do all kinds of data manipulation and work with plain files. Then, the book gives you a primer on databases and teaches you how to work with databases inside Pentaho Data Integration. Moreover, you will be introduced to data warehouse concepts and you will learn how to load data in a data warehouse. After that, you will learn to implement simple and complex processes. Finally, you will have the opportunity of applying and reinforcing all the learned concepts through the implementation of a simple datamart.

With “Pentaho Data Integration Beginner’s Guide, Second Edition”, you will learn everything you need to know in order to meet your data manipulation requirements.

What you will learn from this book

• Install and get started with Pentaho Data Integration
• Get started with MySQL
• Learn the ins and outs of Spoon, the graphical designer tool
• Transform data in several ways such as performing simple and complex calculations, cleaning, counting, de-duplicating, filtering, and ordering
• Learn to get data from all kind of data sources as plain files, Excel spreadsheets, databases, XML files and more, then preview it, and send it back to the same or different destinations
• Discover how to read and parse unstructured files
• Embed Java and JavaScript code in your Pentaho Data Integration transformations to enrich the treatment of data
• Use Pentaho Data Integration to perform CRUD (create, read, update, and delete) operations on databases
• Learn the basic concepts of data warehousing
• Populate a data warehouse with Pentaho Data Integration including loading slowly changing dimensions, junk dimensions, time dimensions and more
• Implement business processes by scheduling tasks, checking conditions, organizing files and folders, running daily processes, treating errors, and so on in a way that meets your requirements

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Getting Started with Pentaho Data Integration
Chapter 2: Getting Started with Transformations
Chapter 3: Manipulating Real-world Data
Chapter 4: Filtering, Searching, and Performing Other Useful Operations with Data
Chapter 5: Controlling the Flow of Data
Chapter 6: Transforming Your Data by Coding
Chapter 7: Transforming the Rowset
Chapter 8: Working with Databases
Chapter 9: Performing Advanced Operations with Databases
Chapter 10: Creating Basic Task Flows
Chapter 11: Creating Advanced Transformations and Jobs
Chapter 12: Developing and Implementing a Simple Datamart

Appendix A: Working with Repositories
Appendix B: Pan and Kitchen: Launching Transformations and Jobs from the Command Line
Appendix C: Quick Reference – Steps and Job Entries
Appendix D: Spoon Shortcuts
Appendix E: Introducing PDI 5 Features
Appendix F: Best Practices
Appendix G: Pop Quiz Answers