Introduction

We have covered a lot of concepts and techniques in this book so far, and there is a lot more that needs to be covered. The subjects that we have put together in this chapter were selected on the basis of the frequency of questions we've been asked on different forums or by customers that we were helping out rather than following a core theme, as was the case for the previous chapters.

For the most part, the recipes in this chapter are a different take on topics that have already been discussed in earlier chapters. Here, we are either using metadata differently than would be expected or we are digging a little deeper into concepts that we have already touched on. Truth be told, this is a little bit of a catch all chapter, but we thought these recipes too important to be left aside, so here you go!

To integrate ODI with external tools, we will look into how to invoke an external program that requires a password or other connectivity parameters, and how to connect to an Excel spreadsheet...