.01 Introduction to Spoon
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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
Follow the instructions below to install Spoon:
Install the Sun Microsystems Java Runtime Environment version 1.5 or higher. You can download a JRE for free at http://www.javasoft.com/.
Unzip the binary distribution zip-file in a directory of your choice.
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
The scripts below allow you to launch Spoon on different platforms:
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
The Spoon GUI is supported on the following 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
Below is a list of known issues associated with Spoon.
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
The Main tree in the upper-left panel of Spoon allows you to browse connections associated with the jobs and transformations you have open. When designing a transformation, the Core Objects palate in the lower left-panel contains the available steps used to build your transformation including input, output, lookup, transform, joins, scripting steps and more. When designing a job, the Core objects palate contains the available job entries. The Core Objects bar contains a variety of job entry types. These items are described in detail in the following chapters: .03 Database Connections, .06 Hops, .09 Transformation Steps, .11 Job Entries, .12 Graphical View.