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This is the first in a series of tutorials on using Talend Open Studio to perform data integration tasks. Talend Open Studio (TOS) is a very flexible tool for manipulating data - taking it from here and putting it there; but the documentation is a bit dry and it's sometimes difficult to figure out just which bits do what. This tutorial is taken from a real life task and demonstrates some of the more complex aspects of using TOS to perform a real job.
So what's the job? The requirements were these:
I've a weather station running at home (see my site TulligWeather). The software that logs the weather data writes the information to a "comma separated values" (CSV) data file - one line of data every 5 minutes. My requirement was to find a reliable way to insert this into a database so that I can manipulate it further (e.g. draw charts; but that's another tutorial). Once the data is in a database it's easy to query it to find maximum or minimum values, averages, trends and the like.
If you want to follow this tutorial then you'll need these ingredients:
- A MySQL database. I have MySQL installed on a separate (Linux) machine to my desktop; but you can install it on your Windows PC if you've got more than a Gb or so of RAM. Download the latest community version and run the installer. Make sure your remember your root password if you're prompted for one during installation. Many web hosting packages these days come with at least one MySQL database so you can use this instead of installing MySQL on your PC. If you want to use a web hosted database then you'll need to know the host name, user name and password for the database. Your web host should be able to help out with this information.
- Talend Open Studio. I've been using the latest release of version 4 which is at M3 at the time of writing. However I've found it to be perfectly stable and fixes an annoying bug that exists in version 3.2. Download the Windows installer, it's a fair size at more than 230Mb, and install it.
- Activestate Active Perl. This isn't strictly necessary - TOS can generate scripts in two languages, Java or Perl. Both of these are built into TOS; but the Perl is broken. You can do this whole project generating Java; but as I know Perl I prefer to use Perl. Once you've downloaded and installed Active Perl you'll need to run the Perl Package Manager and search for a package called DBD::MySQL. Mark this package for installation and then apply this to install the package. This will allow TOS to connect to your database using Perl.
Now you should have a MySQL database, TOS and Active Perl (including DBD::MySQL) installed on your PC. The next step will be to fire up TOS and create your project, more on this later.
Whilst I'm not a support service for MySQL, TOS or Active Perl installation let me know if you run into problems and I'll see if I can point you in the right direction.
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