talend as an ETL Tool
What is data transformation
Data transformation is the process of converting data from one format to another, typically from the format of a source system into the required format of a destination system. Data transformation is a one of major component of most Data integrations.
How Data Transformation works
The goal of the data transformation process is to extract data from a source, convert it into a usable format, and deliver it to a destination. This entire process is known as ETL (Extract, Transformation, Load)
We can use ETL tool or any scripting language like python to transform the data. But it is often cost effective and efficient to use ETL tool or platform to make the transformation process in simplified way.
As most of the ETL tools provides the visual representation of data flow, it is easier to understand the transformation process.
Other than those features, some of the ETL tools provide a way to install ETL jobs/runtime containers as services on the containers or in cloud.
talend
talend open studio provides a single platform to Extract, Transform and Load your data, no matter the format or where it is stored. As it offers graphical drag and drop tools and a range of components and connectors, it is easy for the users to develop and run their transformation jobs efficiently.
talend provides a good documentation and tutorials to users and it covers most of its components and connectors with the examples and use cases. Not only that, talend has a good community which provides prompt answers for the questions raised by the users.
talend documentation — https://help.talend.com/
Talend community — https://community.talend.com/s/article/New-Talend-Academy-learning-experience-available-to-everyone?_ga=2.138141944.970387460.1617475395-1760473650.1612933501
If user needs to go with advanced transformation features/functionalities, talend has talend commercial product and cloud tool both.
How to install talend
You can download talend open studio from here https://www.talend.com/products/talend-open-studio
Please note that you need to download talend open studio for ESB
You can find the installation information from here https://help.talend.com/r/KMuqp2HM0UOrRllqA9mIzA/uBqTPYtqsvEwx1HfoG6QSg
Working with talend open studio
talend studio allows you to create jobs by dropping different technical components from the Palette onto the design workspace and then connecting these components together.
talend provides number of components that users can use to transform their data.
Ex: tXmlmap, tExtractJsnField, tRestRequest, tRestResponse, tFileInputJson, tFileOutputJson, etc.
Users can create jobs, sub jobs, multi jobs using these components.
Install talend jobs as services
talend provides a talend runtime container in which we can deploy talend jobs and that container can be installed as a service on a container or a virtual machine or a physical machine.
Below you can see I have installed talend runtime container as a service on my windows machine.
Then, you can invoke your talend service to transform your data to desired format as below.
Conclusion
Hope you could get a better understanding of how you can use talend as an ETL tool. In next post, let’s discuss more about boomi as an ETL tool.
