Pentaho® Kettle Solutions: Building Open Source ETL Solutions with Pentaho Data Integration

Chapter 3. Installation and Configuration

This chapter provides a high-level overview of the collection of tools included in a Kettle installation, and provides detailed instructions for their installation and configuration. Fortunately, installing Kettle is a fairly straightforward task, but it is helpful to refer to a single overview of all tasks involved, which is what this chapter aims to provide.

Note

If you've already successfully installed Kettle, it's likely you're already familiar with many of the topics discussed here. You may want to skim over some of this chapter.

In addition to providing an overview, this chapter covers a few detailed configuration topics that apply to particular real-world Kettle scenarios. These sections may not make a lot of sense until you encounter those scenarios, so the subsequent chapters of the book will refer back to the relevant sections of this chapter.

Kettle Software Overview

Kettle is a single product, but consists of multiple programs that are used in different phases of the ETL development and deployment cycle. Each program serves a particular purpose and is more or less independent of the others. However, all of the programs depend on a common set of Java archives that make up the actual data integration engine. An overview of the main Kettle programs is shown in Figure 3-1.

Figure 3.1. Overview of Kettle programs

The following list briefly ...