Migrating Transformations in Pentaho PDI

Question

We are using two servers, one as preprod and other as Production. When we are migrating jobs or Transformations from preprod to Prod it copies its connection properties as well and this affects our Production job execution. Can someone let me know how to migrate transformations without coping it's connections to another server.

Answer 1

If by 'connection' you mean 'databases connection', JNDI allows you to give them a symbolic name independent of your environment : it is when you configure your environment (e.g. biserver or baserver) that you specify to which database (jdbc driver, IP and port,...) this symbolic name is related. So your transformations don't contain any refrence to a server adress and you can deploy it "as is".

I use JNDI for my CDE dashboards in biserver too : to deploy a dashboard, I just export it from the dev environment and import it in the preprod environment without modifying anything.

There are a lot of resources on the web about JNDI. Check the Pentaho documentation too.

Answer 2

From the Tools->Options menu, there are two checkboxes that effect PDI's import behavior: "Replace existing objects on open/import" and "Ask before replacing objects".

Normally when migrating between environments, I set the first option to false. That way if a connection definition already exists, it is silently not replaced. The other way to go is to check both options on and answer 'No' when asked to replace an existing definition.

In this way, a transform/job that runs on pre-prod can simply be exported and imported into prod without changing anything, and it runs against prod in the new environment as long as the connections are named the same.

The only thing to watch out for is importing a new connection definition for the first time. There will be no warning that a new connection object is being created, and after import, it will still point to pre-prod. After each new connection import, you need to change the connection definition to point to the new environment. The good new is you only have to do that once.

I wish they had an option, or just an info dialog to show all new connection objects created as a result of the import; that way you would know exactly what you need to change. But alas -- earwax.