Pentaho® Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL®

Chapter 10. Designing Pentaho Data Integration Solutions

In the previous chapter, we introduced a set of tools and utilities that make up Pentaho Data Integration (PDI). We gave some extra attention to the data integration design tool Spoon, and provided two walkthroughs to familiarize the reader with its user interface. In this chapter, you learn how to put these skills to use to build the transformations and jobs that are used to fill the World Class Movies data warehouse.

This chapter offers a hands-on approach, focusing on common problems and practical solutions. Although we use the World Class Movies data warehouse as an example, we believe most of the problems encountered are common to most data warehouses. The methods used in this chapter are by no means the only possible solution. Rather we have chosen a number of approaches to acquaint you with the most often needed features of Pentaho Data Integration.

The best way to read this chapter is to download all PDI transformations and jobs from this book's website at www.wiley.com/go/pentahosolutions so you can easily open them, check any details, run a preview, or more.

Note

In addition to the samples and exercises discussed in this chapter, you are encouraged to take a look at the samples included with PDI. You can find them in the samples directory which is located in the PDI home directory. The samples directory itself contains a jobs and a transformations subdirectory containing sample jobs and transformations. The samples