Top Ten Timesaving Talend Tips of Two Thousand Eleven: Part 1

The end of the year is the season for lists and I just listened to the S's in the complete Beatle's catalog on the radio.  Here are 10 timesaving tips for Talend Open Studio for Data Integration that I used in 2011.



#10 Drag and drop a component on a connector

From the Palette, select a component and drag over a connection.  When the connection is highlighted, release the mouse.  This works particularly well with tFilterRow and tLogRow and avoids having to connect/reconnect several connections.

Drag a Component onto a Connection

#9 Copy and paste

Sometimes, you may want to take a second pass on a data file to handle another case.  Selecting a subjob, right-clicking "Copy", then right-clicking "Paste", will produce an identical subjob with the components renamed so that it readily compiles and runs.  You can then tweak this second job to handle the second pass.  Use this with caution as too much copy-paste-and-tweaking leads to maintenance problems and makes the job less receptive to change.

Subjob Context Menu with Copy Command

#8 Chain multitable inserts

With good business keys, you can take multiple passes over the data to write into normalized tables.  Without good keys, or if you want to streamline your Talend job, you can chain together DB output components to write to multiple tables.  In this screenshot, two DB writes are connected by a tMSSqlLastInsertId component.

Two Output Components Chained Together

For more detail on using tMSSqlLastInsertId, see this post: tMSSqlLastInsertId Returns 0.

#7 Drag jobs on canvas to create tRunJobs

You can drag a tRunJob component from the Palette to the canvas and set the child job.  A faster way is to drag a job from the Repository onto the canvas, saving a step to lookup the job in Component View.

Creating tRunJob from the Repository

#6 Manage documentation through Talend

Project documentation and configuration can be managed through the Talend Repository.  This makes it eligible for export from a single place (Export Items).  This is used for sharing among workspaces; the documentation isn't exported with the Export Job function.

A Config File Maintained in Talend Documentation

Part 2 will pick up with item #5 and will include my #1 time saving Talend tip.  See you in 2012.