Introduction

Overview

An explanation of the common uses and key benefits of PDI.

Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) is an extract, transform, and load (ETL) solution that uses an innovative metadata-driven approach.

PDI includes the DI Server, a design tool, three utilities, and several plugins.

Pentaho Data Integration is an extremely flexible tool that addresses a broad number of use cases including:

Data warehouse population with built-in support for slowly changing dimensions and surrogate key creation
Data migration between different databases and applications
Loading huge data sets into databases taking full advantage of cloud, clustered, and massively parallel processing environments
Data Cleansing with steps ranging from very simple to very complex transformations
Data Integration including the ability to leverage real-time ETL as a data source for Pentaho Reporting
Rapid prototyping of ROLAP schemas
Hadoop functions: Hadoop job execution and scheduling, simple Hadoop MapReduce design, Amazon EMR integration

Pentaho Data Integration features and benefits include:

Installs in minutes; you can be productive in one afternoon
100% Java with cross platform support for Windows, Linux, and Macintosh
Easy to use graphical designer with over 100 out-of-the-box mapping objects including inputs, transforms, and outputs
Simple plug-in architecture for adding your own custom extensions
Enterprise Data Integration server providing security integration, scheduling, and robust content management including full revision history for jobs and transformations
Integrated designer (Spoon) combining ETL with metadata modeling and data visualization, providing the perfect environment for rapidly developing new Business Intelligence solutions
Streaming engine architecture provides the ability to work with extremely large data volumes
Enterprise-class performance and scalability with a broad range of deployment options including dedicated, clustered, and/or cloud-based ETL servers