Matt Casters on Data Integration

Hello Kettle people!

It’s been a while since my last blog but I since there is always so much to tell you about Kettle, it’s high time to pick up the pace again.

This time I want to inform you that Kettle developer superstar Samatar informed me that he’s working on JSON steps as par of JIRA case PDI-3323 (input/output).

(click to see full size image)

Let’s hope the input step arrives in time to test Aaron’s (phytodata) REST/JSON web services on the BI server 3.7.

I’m also happy to inform you that Samatar will be joining us in Portugal for Pentaho’s yearly Community Meeting, September 25-26.  And, just to make sure you’ll recognize us there I’m posting a goofy picture of the both of us.

The picture was taken a few years ago when I visited his office in Paris.  I told him back then the picture would surface sooner of later

Until next time,

Matt

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Dear Kettle fans,

A few weeks ago, when I was stuck in the US after the MySQL User Conference, a new book was published by Packt Publishing.

That all by itself is something that is not too remarkable.  However, this time it’s a book about my brainchild Kettle. That makes this book very special to me. The full title is Pentaho 3.2 Data Integration : Beginner’s Guide (Amazon, Packt).  The title all by itself explains the purpose of this book: give the reader a quick-start when it comes to Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle).

The author María Carina Roldán (blog, twitter) is a seasoned BI consultant and a valued member of the Kettle community. Besides her frequent appearances on our forum, she is appreciated by many for the time she spent on the Kettle Tutorial.

I’m not going to go over the detailed table of content.  Since I wrote the foreword of the book, I’m sure you’ll agree I’m somewhat biased. However, in all objectivity, the book covers what it claims to cover: it does help the PDI/Kettle beginner tremendously.  It covers all you need to get started and then some: the installation of PDI, the typical “Hello World” setup of PDI, reading text files, calculating, scripting, databases, repositories, etc.  As the title indicates, this book covers the current 3.2 stable release of Kettle, not the upcoming 4.0 release. However, for as far as 99% of the topics covered are concerned, that shouldn’t make too much of a difference.

So obviously I can recommend this book very much. It’s a time-saver for those that are starting with PDI.  For those that have dabbled with Kettle before I must say that María packed the book with nice tips and tricks so I’m sure you’ll be able to learn a thing or two.

Until next time,

Matt

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As requested by a few fans out there, here are the slides of my presentation:

Pentaho Data Integration 4.0 and MySQL.pdf

I had a great time at the conference, met a lot of nice folks, friends, customers, partners and colleagues. After the conference I was unable to get back home like so many of you because of the Paul Simon singing Eyjafjallajökul volcano in Iceland.

So I ended up flying over to Orlando for a week of brutal PDI 4.0 RC1 hacking with the rest of the l33t super Pentaho development team.  However, after 2+ weeks from home, even a severe storm over Philadelphia couldn’t prevent me from getting home eventually.

Until next time,
Matt

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Dear Kettle and MySQL fans,

Next week I’ll be strolling around the MySQL user conference in Santa Clara.  Even better, I’ll be presenting Tuesday afternoon (3:05pm).  The topic is Pentaho Data Integration 4.0 and MySQL.

The presentation will show you what the world’s most popular open source data integration tool can do for a MySQL user.  It will include practical examples and will showcase the latest improvements present in the brand new version 4.0.

Even more than the presentation itself, I’m looking forward to meeting you all over there.  The regular crowd, MySQL users, Pentaho partners, folks from Calpont, Continuent, SQLStream and many others but also the many new colleagues in San Francisco.

More than anything else I’m looking forward to hear about your Kettle successes and real-world data integration war stories.  If you want to chat about Kettle 4, see things first-hand or simply join the Pentaho gang for a beer, don’t hesitate to ask.  I’ll try to regularly tweet my whereabouts at the user conference so you’ll know where I’m at.

Let me finish with a note to everybody that promised me beer in return for features and bug fixes: it’s payback time!

See you soon at the conference!
Matt

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Dear Kettle fans,

As you know, Kettle 4.0 received a new logging framework not so long ago.  It allows us to know exactly where a log-line comes from, even in complex ETL situations.

So when codek asked to know the cause of errors in a job, it was quite easy to implement this.

Here is a single screen shot that should explain it all (click to open image):

Until next time!

Matt

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