Pentaho Data Integration: Beginner’s Guide, 2nd Edition

03/12/2014 · No Responses

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

Approach
This book focuses on teaching you by example. The book walks you through every aspect of Pentaho Data Integration, giving systematic instructions in a friendly style, allowing you to learn in front of your computer, playing with the tool. The extensive use of drawings and screenshots make the process of learning Pentaho Data Integration easy. Throughout the book, numerous tips and helpful hints are provided that you will not find anywhere else.

Who this book is for
This book is a must-have for software developers, database administrators, IT students, and everyone involved or interested in developing ETL solutions, or, more generally, doing any kind of data manipulation. Those who have never used Pentaho Data Integration will benefit most from the book, but those who have, they will also find it useful.

This book is also a good starting point for database administrators, data warehouse designers, architects, or anyone who is responsible for data warehouse projects and needs to load data into them.