After my review for the newest Pentaho Reporting book, Packt Publishing asked me to write a review for the latest Pentaho Data Integration Cookbook as well, which just came out in December.

Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) is Pentaho’s answer to overpriced and proprietary ETL tools. In a Business Intelligence setting, you use ETL tools like PDI to populate your data warehouse, and outside of that, PDI is a Swiss army knife of tools to move and transform  vast amounts of data virtually from and to any system or format.

María Carina Roldán and Adrián Sergio Pulvirenti already wrote the first edition of the Pentaho Data Integration Cookbook. Maria is a Webdetails fellow and this is her fourth book about Pentaho Data Integration. For this book they are joined by Alex Meadows, from Red Hat, and a long term member of the Pentaho Community.

The book provides a very hands-on approach to PDI. True to its title as a cookbook, the book divides all information into handy recipes that show you – in a very practical way – an no fuss example of the problem and solution. All recipes follow the same schema:

• state the problem,
• create a transformation or job in PDI to solve the problem,
• and after that, provide a detailed explanation of what just happened and explain potential pitfalls

The book covers every potential area, from database input and output to text-files, XML and Big-Data access (Hadoop and MongoDB). After the basic Input and Output tasks, the book explores the various flow control and data lookup options PDI offers. It also ventures beyond ordinary ETL tasks by showing how PDI integrates with Pentaho Reporting and the Pentaho BI-Server. If you want it even more advanced than that, the book also covers how to read and manipulate PDI transformations as XML files or read them from databases.

The book’s examples stay simple and practical and when used in conjunction with the downloadable content, are easy to follow. If you worked with ETL tools before or have at least a basic understanding of how to get data in and out of databases and computer systems, you will find this book an valuable companion that answers your questions quickly and completely.

The book is a bit sparse on screen shots, which makes it more difficult to follow the examples without the accompanying downloads. If you run PDI in a non-English environment, I would thus recommend to switch it to English first, so that the label texts align with the books description.

The authors focus on solving practical tasks at hand and keeps that focus through the whole book. For a reference book, this is a perfect set up and I enjoyed the fact that you can jump directly to the correct chapter simply by reading the headings in the Table of Contents.

In conclusion, this book is great for practitioners who need a quick reference guide and need solutions to solve their starting problems with PDI. If you are familiar with ETL from other tools, then this book gets you started in no time at all.

If you are both new to PDI and data warehousing in general, make sure to read this book in conjunction with general introductory books on Data Warehousing or ETL, like Ralph Kimbals The Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit or Matt Caster’s and Roland Bouman’s Pentaho Kettle Solutions.

After visiting the Pentaho London User Group, Diethard Steiner surprised me with a brand new book about Pentaho Reporting: Pentaho 5.0 Reporting By Example. I had been way to bogged down with the 5.0 release to notice much about anything, but missing a whole book is new even for me. This book is so fresh, the software it is describing has not even been released as community edition.

The book is written by the two founders of eGluBI, an Argentinian BI-Consultancy and training company. Both have a strong background as lecturers at the Univerity Aeronautic Instutute in Cordoba, Argentinia. Their teaching experience shows throughout the book, as the writing is hands on, practical and concentrates on getting the mechanics across instead of drowning you in theory or endless lists of properties.

The book starts with a quick overview about Pentaho Reporting showing examples of some of the reports you can create. It then dives directly into the learning action and gets you started by installing the report-designer and giving a tour around the user interface.

When you go through the content of the book, you’ll notice that the book swings back and forth between guided, step-by-step actions titled “Time for action” and, after you created something on the screen, an explaination section named “What just happened”, that gives you some theoretical understanding of the task you just performed.

This very hands-on approach effectively demonstrates the mechanics of the reporting engine, without distracting you with unnecessary information. Along the way it showers you in bits of instant gratification, which makes the dry topic of business reporting a rather pleasant experience.

When you work through the chapters, you will touch all the important bits and pieces, from Data-sources, parameters and formulas to groups, charts and subreports.

The books structure reminds me of a course or practical teaching session and shows that both authors have an teaching background.

The book is clearly aimed at beginners, and thus concentrates on breadth instead of depth. I think this is one of the strong points of this book . It focuses on helping you understand what is going on, and enables you to find your way around the more advanced topics in the Pentaho Infocentre or the forum.

The only thing I found puzzling was the servlet programming example hidden in the last chapter. The whole book is aimed at non-programmers and business users, and thus the coding part feels out of place. And aside from that, they covered the BI-server and publishing reports there. As a integrator, I would recommend to run a BI-server in parallel to your own web-application. It saves you from reimplementing boring infrastructure parts, like security, reposities and so on, and the servlet specs contain enough goodies to access content from other web-applications on the same server if needed.

Verdict

Would I recommend ‘Pentaho 5.0 Reporting by Example’ to new users? Absolutely. This book greatly lowers the hurdles to become productive with the Pentaho Report Designer, and helps you getting started quicker. If you are a seasoned Pentaho Reporting user, you probably won’t find much new knowledge in here. But you might want to hand out copies of the book to clients to help them on their road to success.

And if your job is to teach Pentaho Reporting to new users, or to create a beginners course for Pentaho Reporting, then this book forms an ideal base for this teaching work.

It is now official. The next release of Pentaho Reporting will be numbered 5.0, in sync with the Pentaho Suite 5.0. Future releases will then keep in sync with the suite version number and will be released at the same time as the Pentaho Server.

Although it is a shame that you will no longer be able to impress friends and family with the arcane knowledge of what PRD goes with a given release of the BA-Server, it will simplify the story for support, marketing, sales and everyone else.

We are now also officially in feature-lock-down. We thus have finally entered the last stages of the development process (the remaining phases being ‘stress’, ‘panic’ and ‘outright agony’). That means, no new features get added, regardless how good they are, and we now concentrate solely on working though the remaining items of the sprint backlogs.