Introduction

A transformation by itself rarely meets all the requirements of a real-world problem. It's common to face some of the following situations:

• You need to execute the same transformation over and over again

• You need to execute a transformation more than once, but with different parameters each time

• You decide at runtime which job to run from a group of jobs

• You have to reuse part of a transformation in a different scenario

Kettle is versatile enough to allow you to do that kind of thing. However, you may get confused trying to do some of them without guidance.

This chapter contains quick recipes just meant to teach you the basics. The transformations and jobs used are simple enough to serve as templates for you to modify for your own needs.

Before starting on the recipes, let's take a look at the following subsections:

• Sample transformations: As the name suggests, this section explains the sample transformations that will be used throughout the chapter.

• Launching jobs and transformations...