Introduction

As we have seen in earlier chapters, Kettle provides a lot of functionality out of the box, but there are a lot of great feedback mechanisms that have been added that can help make developing and working with data even easier. Being able to profile and visualize data streams allows for developers to gather feedback from customers to determine if they have met customer requirements. Some of these features are not provided directly in the tool, but are available as plugins. One of Kettle's most distinguishing features is the ability to create and add plugins directly into the tool.

In this chapter you will learn to work with plugins as well as work with some of the advanced capabilities that they provide.

Note

The plugin ecosystem is a vibrant and growing component of the Pentaho community. Plugins are sometimes picked up and made part of the core Kettle project. If you find that one of the plugins mentioned in the following recipes is already in your version of Kettle, don't be...