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What's new in PDI version 3.1

What's new in PDI version 3.1

Jan 14, 2016

Index

 

Introduction


In the period that version 3.1 came about, we had 5 other releases: 2.5.2, 3.0.1, 3.0.2, 3.0.3 and 3.0.4.  All the same, we managed to get quite a bit of work done.

The first theme for this release was "Ease of use".  It's a theme shared with the rest of the Pentaho platform and tool set.  Traditionally, Kettle isn't the worst player in that department, but you can always do better.

The second theme of this release was the complete rework of the documentation set.  To keep things manageable by larger groups of people we moved everything we could to the central Pentaho wiki.
Documenting is a difficult task that can never be considered complete but the wiki will help us to keep up with the incredible pace of development that we again achieved in Kettle.

Ease of use

Execution results

To do away with the tab-clutter that came about in the previous release we decided to put the results of executions in a split pane below the graphical view:

Performance graph

To make it easier to see which step is performing well or not, we periodically (configurable) gather performance statistics and we can show those on a graph:



 
We also allow you to store the raw data behind the graph in a database table so that you can create your own statistics.

FAQ attack

We're constantly on the look out to reduce the size of our FAQ, not increase it.  We do this by informing the users of consequences of certain decisions or giving answers to FAQ in the Spoon GUI.

Some of these FAQ attack measures are subtle, like the fact you can now execute a stored procedure without the need for input to go to the step. (it simply executes once).

Others are less subtle, like the tool-tip we show after you dragged the second step onto the canvas:

New database dialog

The old database dialog was sometimes a bit confusing.  It became one of the most complete database connection configuration tool, but usability and clarity suffered because of this.
At the same time we had the need for a shared database dialog to be used by different tools in the Pentaho stack.  Because of this, we opted to create the dialog in the Mozilla backed XUL standard.
An SWT layer was created and the new dialog is now much easier on the eyes and much easier to use:

 
As you can see, only those options that are relevant to the selected database and access type are shown.

Zoom

If you are dealing with large transformations or jobs, it could be useful to zoom in and out of it to keep an overview:


 

Snap to grid

 

Some people love it, some people hate it, but here it is, the long awaited "snap-to-grid" functionality :

Welcome page / Getting started

We created a "Getting Started" page and linked it on the welcome page.  We also linked a number of extra blogs

Changes in steps

 

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