I have several favorite authors -- Tim Dorsey, Clive Cussler, and few others that I buy their latest book just because I trust the quality of their work. Now on that list are Roland Bouman, Jos van Dongen, and Matt Casters. In a follow up to Bouman's and van Dongen's Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL, the have now produced Pentaho Kettle Solutions which explores the often murky world of ETL and data integration. Kettle can be confusing as there are many components with names such as spoon and pan but these tools are valuable to any DBA who has to feed data into an instance. If you have a data ware house the tools are invaluable.
This book covers initial steps with Kettle to cleaning up the worst raw data and even getting the information into the now ubiquitous cloud. Having stumbled along with a few tutorials and the Kettle docs, I can testify that this book is a must have for anyone wanting to use Kettle to feed a database. The text is clear, the example concise, and the book progresses logically.
Kettle is wonderful for modifying raw data before being sent to your database. need to clean up telephone numbers from xxx-xxx-xxxx, (xxx) xxx-xxxx, or xxxxxxxxxx in your format of choice? Or are state or country abbreviations (Ca, CA, Cal., & California) causing problems. Then you need Kettle and this book.
