In order to work with Pentaho 3.2 Data Integration(PDI) you need to install the software. It’s a simple task; let’s do it.
These are the instructions to install Kettle, whatever your operating system. The only prerequisite to install PDI is to have JRE 5.0 or higher installed. If you don’t have it, please download it from http://www.javasoft.com/ and install it before proceeding. Once you have checked the prerequisite, follow these steps:
cd Kettle
chmod +x *.sh
You have installed the tool in just a few minutes. Now you have all you need to start working
Now that you’ve installed PDI, you must be eager to do some stuff with data. That will be possible only inside a graphical environment. PDI has a desktop designer tool named Spoon. Let’s see how it feels to work with it.
In this tutorial you’re going to launch the PDI graphical designer and get familiarized with its main features.
Spoon.bat
Spoon.sh
sh Spoon.sh
You ran for the first time the graphical designer of PDI Spoon, and applied some custom configuration.
From the Look Feel configuration window, you changed the size of the dotted grid that appears in the canvas area while you are working. You also changed the preferred language. In the Option tab window, you chose not to show either the repository dialog or the welcome window at startup. These changes were applied as you restarted the tool, not before.
The second time you launched the tool, the repository dialog didn’t show up. When the main window appeared, all the visible texts were shown in French, which was the selected language, and instead of the welcome window, there was a blank screen.
This tool that you’re exploring in this section is the PDI’s desktop design tool. With Spoon you design, preview, and test all your work, that is, transformations and jobs. When you see PDI screenshots, what you are really seeing are Spoon screenshots. The other PDI components that you will meet in the following chapters are executed from terminal windows.
In the tutorial you changed some preferences in the Options window. There are several look and feel characteristics you can change beyond those you changed. Feel free to experiment with this setting.
Remember to restart Spoon in order to see the changes applied.
If you choose any language as preferred language other than English, you should select a diff erent language as alternati ve. If you do so, every name or descripti on not translated to your preferred language will be shown in the alternative language.
Just for the curious people: Italian and French are the overall winners of the list of languages to which the tool has been translated from English. Below them follow Korean, Argenti neanSpanish, Japanese, and Chinese.
One of the setti ngs you changed was the appearance of the welcome window at start up. The welcome window has many useful links, all related with the tool: wiki pages, news, forum access, and more. It’s worth exploring them.
You don’t have to change the settings again to see the welcome window. You can open it from the menu Help | Show the Welcome Screen.
The first time you launched Spoon, you chose No Repository. After that, you confi gured Spoon to stop asking you for the Repository option. You must be curious about what the repository is and why not to use it. Let’s explain it. As said, the results of working with PDI are Transformati ons and Jobs. In order to save the Transformations and Jobs, PDI offers two methods:
The following diagram summarizes this:
You cannot mix the two methods (files and repository) in the same project. Therefore, you must choose the method when you start the tool. Why did we choose not to work with repository, or in other words, to work with fi les? This is mainly for the following two reasons:
Until now, you’ve seen the very basic elements of Spoon. For sure, you must be waiti ng to do some interesting task beyond looking around. It’s time to create your first transformation.
How about starting by saying Hello to the World? Not original but enough for a very first practical exercise. Here is how you do it:
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I am unable to install the batch file - Spoon.bat.
Getting the below error.
C:\Program Files\data-integration>Spoon.bat
WARNING: Using java from path
DEBUG: _PENTAHO_JAVA_HOME=
DEBUG: _PENTAHO_JAVA=javaw.exe
The system cannot find the path specified.
The system cannot find the path specified.
C:\Program Files\data-integration>start "Spoon" "javaw.exe" "-Xms1024m" "-Xmx2048m" "-XX:MaxPermSize=256m" "-Dhttps.protocols=TLSv1,TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2" "-Djava.library.path=libswt\win32" "-DKETTLE_HOME=" "-DKETTLE_REPOSITORY=" "-DKETTLE_USER=" "-DKETTLE_PASSWORD=" "-DKETTLE_PLUGIN_PACKAGES=" "-DKETTLE_LOG_SIZE_LIMIT=" "-DKETTLE_JNDI_ROOT=" -jar launcher\pentaho-application-launcher-7.1.0.0-12.jar -lib ..\libswt\win32