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What is Spoon?

Kettle is an acronym for "Kettle E.T.T.L. Environment." Kettle is designed to help you with your ETTL needs, which include the Extraction, Transformation, Transportation and Loading of data.

Spoon is a graphical user interface that allows you to design transformations and jobs that can be run with the Kettle tools — Pan and Kitchen. Pan is a data transformation engine that performs a multitude of functions such as reading, manipulating, and writing data to and from various data sources. Kitchen is a program that executes jobs designed by Spoon in XML or in a database repository. Jobs are usually scheduled in batch mode to be run automatically at regular intervals.

Note: For a complete description of Pan or Kitchen, see the Pan and Kitchen user guides.

Transformations and Jobs can describe themselves using an XML file or can be put in a Kettle database repository. Pan or Kitchen can then read the data to execute the steps described in the transformation or to run the job. In summary, Pentaho Data Integration makes data warehouses easier to build, update, and maintain.

The following topics are covered in this section:

• #Installing Spoon
• #Launching Spoon
• #Supported Platforms
• #Known Issues
• #User Interface Overview
• #Command Line Options
• #Repository
• #License
• #Transformation Definitions
• #Job Definitions
• #Toolbar Icons
• #Kettle Options
• #Search Metadata
• #Set Environment Variable
• #Execution Log History
• #Replay
• #Generate Mapping Against Target Step
• #Safe Mode
• #Welcome Page
   

Installing Spoon

1. Install the Sun Microsystems Java Runtime Environment version 1.5 or higher. You can download a JRE for free at http://www.javasoft.com/.
2. Unzip the binary distribution zip-file in a directory of your choice.
3. Under Unix-like environments (Solaris, Linux, MacOS, for example), you must make the shell scripts executable. Execute these commands to make all shell scripts in the Kettle directory executable:

cd Kettle
chmod +x *.sh

Launching Spoon

• Spoon.bat: launch Spoon on the Windows platform.
• spoon.sh: launch Spoon on a Unix-like platform such as Linux, Apple OSX, Solaris

To make a shortcut under the Windows platform, an icon is provided. Use "spoon.ico" to set the correct icon. Point the shortcut to the spoon.bat file.

Supported Platforms

• Microsoft Windows: all platforms since Windows 95, including Vista
• Linux GTK: on i386 and x86_64 processors, works best on Gnome
• Apple's OSX: works both on PowerPC and Intel machines
• Solaris: using a Motif interface (GTK optional)
• AIX: using a Motif interface
• HP-UX: using a Motif interface (GTK optional)
• FreeBSD: preliminary support on i386, not yet on x86_64
   

Known Issues

Linux
Occasional JVM crashes running SuSE Linux and KDE. Running under Gnome presents no problems. (detected on SUSE Linux 10.1 but earlier versions also have the same problem)

FreeBSD
Problems with drag and drop. Use the right click pop up menu on the canvas as a workaround.

Check the Tracker lists at http://jira.pentaho.com for up-to-date information about recently discovered issues.

User Interface Overview

Command Line Options

-file=<filename>

Runs the specified transformation or job

Default: Last opened files

• .ktr : Kettle Transformation
• .kjb : Kettle Job

-file=transform.ktr

-logfile=<Logging Filename>

Specify the location of the log file.

Default: Standard output.

-logfile=log_file.txt

-level=<Logging Level> sets the log level for the transformation being run.

-level=Basic

Below are the possible values:

-rep=<Repository name> -user=<Username> -pass=<password> -trans=<TransName>

-rep=<Repository name> -user=<Username> -pass=<password> -job=<JobName> 

Automatically load a transformation or a job from a Repository upon startup.

You must specify the options -user, -pass , -job and*-trans*.

The repository details are loaded from the filerepositories.xml in the local directory or in the Kettle directory:

• $HOME/.kettle/
• C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\.kettle on Windows.

Default: Dialog box will ask for Repository details

-rep=repos -user=admin -pass=adminpasswd -trans=trans.ktr

*

Anchor
Command line options on Windows warning Command line options on Windows warning

Important*:

1. On Windows, Pentaho advises you to use the /option:value format to avoid command line parsing problems by the MS-DOS shell.
2. Fields in italic represent the values that the options use.
3. Use quotes or double quotes if there are spaces in option values; quotes ensure that option values stay together.

Repository

 
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The information associated with repositories is stored in "repositories.xml". This file is located in the hidden directory ".kettle" in your default home directory. On Windows, the file is located in C:\Documents and Settings\.kettle

Note: The complete path and file name associated with repositories.xml file is displayed on the Spoon console.
If you don't want Welcome dialog box to appear each time Spoon starts up, disable Present this dialog at startup or use the Options dialog under the Edit / Options menu.

Note: The default password for the administrator is admin. Pentaho strongly recommends that you change this default password using the Repository Explorer or the Repository/Edit User menu.

Repository Auto-Login

You can have Spoon automatically log into the repository by setting the following environment variables: KETTLE_REPOSITORY, KETTLE_USER and KETTLE_PASSWORD.

Important: Because logging automatically poses a security risk, Pentaho strongly recommends that you always lock your computer to prevent unauthorized access to the repository.

License

Note: Pentaho Data Integration is referred to as "Kettle" below.

Copyright (C) 2006 Pentaho Corporation

Kettle is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Kettle is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with the Kettle distribution; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA

Transformation Definitions

Job Definitions

Toolbar Icons

Kettle Options

General Tab

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Look and Feel tab

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Feature	Description
Fixed width font	The font that is used in the dialog boxes, trees, input fields, and so on
Font on workspace	The font that is used on the graphical view
Font for notes	The font to use in notes that are displayed in the Graphical View
Background color	Sets the background color in Spoon. It affects all dialogs too
Workspace background color	Sets the background color in the Graphical View of Spoon
Tab color	The color that is being used to indicate tabs that are active/selected.
Icon size in workspace	Affects the size of the icons in the graph window. The original size of an icon is 32x32 pixels. The best results (graphically) are probably at sizes 16,24,32,48,64 and other multiples of 32.
Line width on workspace	Affects the line width of the hops on the Graphical View and the border around the step.
Shadow size on workspace	If this size is larger then 0, a shadow of the steps, hops, and notes is drawn on the canvas, making it look like the transformation floats above the canvas.
Dialog middle percentage	By default, a parameter is drawn at 35% of the width of the dialog, counted from the left. You can change this with this parameter. May be useful in cases where you use unusually large fonts.
Canvas anti-aliasing?	Some platforms like Windows, OSX and Linux support anti-aliasing through GDI, Carbon or Cairo. Check this to enable smoother lines and icons in your graph view. If you enable this and your environment doesn't work any more afterwards, change the value for option "EnableAntiAliasing" to "N" in file $HOME/.kettle/.spoonrc (C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\.kettle\.spoonrc on Windows)
Use look of OS?	Checking this on Windows allows you to use the default system settings for fonts and colors in Spoon. On other platforms, this is always the case.
Show branding graphics	Enabling this option will draw Pentaho Data Integration branding graphics on the canvas and in the left hand side "expand bar".
Preferred Language	Here you can specify the default language setting. If a certain text hasn't been translated into this locale, Kettle will fall back to the fail over locale.
Alternative Language	Because the original language in which Kettle was written is English, it's best to set this locale to English.

Search Metadata

Set Environment Variable

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Note: This page also displays when you run a transformation that use undefined variables. This allows you to define them right before execution time.

Show environment variables

This feature displays the current list of environment variables and their values. It is accessed by selecting the Edit|Show environment variables option from the menu bar.

Execution Log history

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Note: The log history for a job or transformation also opens by default each next time you execute the file.

Replay

Generate

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Mapping Against Target Step

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After defining your mappings, select OK and the Select Values step containing your mappings will appear on the workspace. Attach the mapping step into your transformation just before the table output step.

Generate mappings example

Below is an example of a simple transformation in which we want to generate mappings to our target output table:

1. Begin by right-clicking on the Table output step and selecting 'Generate mappings against target'.
   
2. Add all necessary mappings using the Generate Mapping dialog shown above and click OK. You will now see a Table output mapping step has been added to the canvas.
   
3. Drag the generated Table output Mapping step into your transformation flow prior to the table output step:
   

Safe Mode

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Note: This option is also available in Pan.

Welcome

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