ORACLENERD: Learning Pentaho Data Integrator

Learning Pentaho Data Integrator

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

aka Kettle, aka PDI.

I've recently taken on a data integration gig and I'll be using Pentaho Data Integrator (PDI). I've read about Pentaho for years but never got around to actually using it. I'm excited about the opportunity.

What is PDI?

...delivers powerful Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL) capabilities using an innovative, metadata-driven approach. With an intuitive, graphical, drag and drop design environment, and a proven, scalable, standards-based architecture, Pentaho Data Integration is increasingly the choice for organizations over traditional, proprietary ETL or data integration tools.

I'll be using the enterprise edition (EE), which is supported, similar to how RedHat works...I think.

This post if mainly for me, naturally. I'm going to list out the references I've found so far and add to it over time. Similar to what I do (err, did) for Learning OBIEE.

Actually, I'll just start with the helpful email I received after being added to the account.

Support - https://pentaho.zendesk.com/home - ask questions of the engineers.
Evaluation Resources - http://www.pentahoevalcenter.com - great technical resource for those new to the tools – recorded tutorials as well - NOTE the drop downs.
Documentation - http://infocenter.pentaho.com/help/index.jsp
Download - and run the full suite (or just Pentaho Data Integration) right on your own computer. Perfect for eval, test/dev, training. Getting started docs included: http://www.pentaho.com/download/
JIRA Tracking - http://jira.pentaho.com - you can request and track features and fixes – triaged twice week by our engineering team. As a reminder, let Support enter any JIRA tickets you want to open.

I love that you can download and play with the software yourself. Of course the Community Edition (CE) is open source, so that makes sense. I'm not sure if you can get the EE version for free though.

There's a community page as well with links to a lot of great resources. So far, my favorite has to be the IRC channel hosted at freenode. Note, there are two hashtags as in ##pentaho. I've been lurking there for a few weeks and finally got up the nerve (what? me shy?) last week. HansVA and mburgess_pdi helped get me moving again on a particular problem. Good stuff.

I'm sure I'll add more as time goes on. That's it for now.

Update after original posting...