Learning Pentaho Data Integration 8 CE

Book excerpt: Get up and running with the Pentaho Data Integration tool using this hands-on, easy-to-read guide About This Book 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 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 In Detail 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. Style and approach Step by step guide filled with practical, real world scenarios and examples.