Introduction

Managing metadata is one of the most important aspects of developing Talend jobs, and the most common form of metadata used within Talend jobs is the schema.

Schema metadata

For successful development of jobs, it is essential that the metadata defined for a data source accurately describes the format of its underlying data. Failure to correctly define the data will result in numerous errors and waste of time tracking down problems with data formats that could otherwise be avoided.

Talend provides a host of wizards for capturing metadata from a variety of data sources such as database tables, delimited files, and Excel worksheets and stores them within its built-in metadata repository.

Schemas

Talend stores metadata definitions in schemas, which may be built in to individual components or stored in its metadata repository, as shown in the following screenshot:

In general, it is best practice to define source and target metadata using a repository schema and mid-flow metadata as a Built...