New Pentaho Kettle book

 

Hi all,

Last year, at the same time, I wrote and article about the first Pentaho book published. Simply called Pentaho Solutions, this book covers the basics of datawarehousing and Pentaho tools. You can find the original article here and order this valuable book here.

Recently, I received my own review copy of a long awaited Pentaho book : Pentaho Kettle Solutions – Building Open Source ETL Solutions with Pentaho Data Integration.

Thanks to Roland, Matt and Jos for sending me this new book.

ISBN: 978-0-470-63517-9

Matt Casters is the Pentaho Chief of Data Integration and Kettle founder (Kettle’s dad, it’s him). Have a look to his prolific blog here.

Roland is an IT expert, ranging from web application development and business process analysis to business intelligence. He co-authored the MySQL Cluster 5.1 Certification Study Guide. Please, have a look to his blog.

Jos is a BI expert with more than 15 years of experience. He created Tholis Consulting and is also covering BI developments for the Dutch Database Magazine.

 

What is this book about ?

The first book, Pentaho Solutions, was aimed at discovering the basics of BI and Pentaho usage. Now, with this new book, we go deeper into hardcode dataprocessing and datawarehousing using Kettle. But it is not exclusively focused on Kettle : a strong emphasis is placed on data processing basics, technics and theory (Codd vs Kimbal …). Reading this book will get you to the next upper level on these two topics :

• Data processing and how to build / feed a datawarehouse,
• Kettle development, customization and advanced usage.

 

Book summary

• Introduction
  • What’s an ETL and what are Kettle key concepts
  • How to install Kettle and configure it
  • Real life example : Sakila datawarehouse
• ETL and ETL subsystems
  • What are the famous ETL Subsystems (Kimabal). A very detailed and inspiring chapter.
  • Extraction
  • Cleansing and conforming
  • Handling dimension tables
  • Loading facts tables
  • Working with OLAP data.
• Management and deployment
  • Typical ETL development lifecycle. A must read here !
  • Scheduling and monitoring
  • Versioning
  • Lineage and auditing.
• Performance and scalability
  • Performance tuning. Here again, a must read that will give you precious information on how to make your Kettle set up reach the hills of performance and stability.
  • Parallelization, clustering and Partitioning : my favorite. You have big data and / or strong constraints ? Think parallel and start building your own Kettle cluster / parallel set up. As to me, the best chapter ever written on this topic, all ETLs included.
  • Dynamic clustering in the cloud. Once again my favorite. You all know my passion for Cloud Computing ! Very technical article, you need real experience on using AWS tools and APIs.
• Advanced topics
  • Data Vault Management : interesting concept. You will learn about Data Vault and discover this mixed (Codd with 3NF / Kimbal with star schema) approach in detail.
  • Handling complex data formats.
  • Web Services. I love that one too ! More and more datawarehouses are now feeded by using web services. Learn how to feed yours by leveraging Kettle.
  • Kettle integration
  • Extending Kettle. Yummy ! If, like me, you created your own Kettle plugins or want to, this chapter is a must read. Java programing experience is needed.
• The Kettle Ecosystem
  • Kettle enterprise edition features : comparative matrix.
  • Built in variables and properties reference : a must read in order to be aware of Kettle internals, and be able to create fully automatised / self sufficient jobs.

My opinion

This book is a fantastic concentration of knowledge. You will learn from ETL basics, advanced topics, performance management, Kettle development and cloud dataprocessing. Matt, Roland and Jos met a risky challenge : writing a book that do the splits from basic knowledge to high level technics while staying focused on how to use Kettle to solve actual and concrete data problems.

They succeeded.

This book is now sitting on my reference BI shelf, it entered my personal BI Book Hall of Fame.