Pentaho

I sat in on a meeting to review the Pentaho tools. It's an impressive set of tools.

We focussed on the "Kettle" and "Spoon" tools (Pentaho uses a kitchen motif for their names). "Spoon" offers an easy-to-use interface for the configuration (it's too easy to be programming) of an ETL operation. The tools make for easy extraction, transformation, and loading (which is what ETL is all about).

Way back when, we called these tools "swabbers" (from "swap bytes A and B"). They were much simpler but did the same task: read data from a source, transform it, and send it to a destination. The Pentaho suite handles neat things like parallel threads and multiple sources and destinations and scheduled jobs.

Not a bad hour to invest.