Getting data from relational databases

Relational databases are some of the most common sources of data in any ETL process. PDI enables you to connect and get data from multiple RDBMS engines, including the most popular (for example, Oracle or MySQL) but also other engines. The only prerequisite is that there exists the proper JDBC driver. In this section, you will learn how to connect to, explore, and get data from a database.

Connecting to a database and using the database explorer

There are two things that you must do in order to connect to a database, if you intend to use its data inside PDI:

• Install the proper JDBC driver
• Create a connection to the database

For demonstration purposes, we will connect to a...