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.

What you will learn from this book

• Install Penataho Data Integration and get familiar with the graphical designer--Spoon
• Work with files to get data from simple input sources, preview, and send it back in any of the common output formats
• Perform basic transformation operations on data such as performing calculations, adding constants, counting, filtering, ordering, and searching data
• Solve real-world problems by manipulating the flow of data by combining or splitting it
• Solve sophisticated problems such as normalizing data from pivoted tables with ease
• Explore the various PDI options to validate data and to handle errors
• Connect to a database engine of your choice to get and store information coming from any source
• Perform advanced operations with databases such as loading data warehouses dimensions
• Create advanced processes such as nesting jobs, iterating on jobs and transformations, and creating subtransformations
• Implement business processes by scheduling tasks, checking conditions, organizing files and folders, sending emails with alerts, and treating errors in a way that meets your requirements

Approach
As part of Packt's Beginner's Guide, this book focuses on teaching by example. The book walks you through every aspect of PDI, giving step-by-step 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 PDI easy. Throughout the book numerous tips and helpful hints are provided that you will not find anywhere else.

The book provides short, practical examples and also builds from scratch a small datamart intended to reinforce the learned concepts and to teach you the basics of data warehousing.

Who this book is written for
This book is 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. If you have never used PDI before, this will be a perfect book to start with.

You will find this book is a good starting point if you are a database administrator, data warehouse designer, architect, or any person who is responsible for data warehouse projects and need to load data into them.

You don't need to have any prior data warehouse or database experience to read this book. Fundamental database and data warehouse technical terms and concepts are explained in easy-to-understand language.