For those people starting with Kettle (Pentaho Data Integration) we created a Getting Started page on our Wiki.

Since I realized that for some people, simple and easy can never be simple and easy enough I created 8 mini-flash demos :

• Create a new transformation - create a step (flash demo, 0′20″)
• Create a hop between 2 steps (flash demo, 0′20″)
• Create a database connection (flash demo, 0′45″)
• …

I am, for the most part, a do-it-yourself type of person. I fix my own car if I can; I even have four healthy tomato plants growing in pots outside as we speak — the plants will take that little extra CO2 out of the air and give me great tasting tomatoes (soon… i hope!)

But I digress.

Whether to use an ETL tool such as Kettle (aka Penatho Data Integration) for a project involving large data transfers is a typical “build vs. buy” type of decision, one that is fairly well understood and I don’t wish to repeat it all here — putting together some Perl scripts to do the job, you typically get great performance, development speed and accessibility. This would need to be balanced against the benefits of ETL tools and their potential drawbacks (development speed, license costs and performance …

I've been working on a very fun and challenging proof of concept / usability project that involves Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle), XUL, SWT, Swing and a very cool, slightly controversial theory: with a lot of work frontloaded, we should be able to port user interfaces to any UI technology, and expect consistent behavior AND look and feel without much, if any, additional code .

The project I'm in the middle of encompasses three different but equally compelling goals:

1. To move Pentaho forward in providing common layers across our core pillars (reporting , analysis, data mining, ETL and dashboards).
2. To provide a proof of concept for the Pentaho XUL Framework, an architecture built to help us support common UIs across all of our applications and tools .
3. To provide a common way of describing and managing the information needed to connect to a database.

So, we began by …

One of the enhancements I added to MySQL Archiver in the recent release was listed innocently in the changelog as "Destination plugins can now rewrite the INSERT statement." Not very exciting or informative, huh? Keep reading.