Kettle - Spoon

Aggregating content from various sources and making it suitable for presentation in a form that is universally recognizable by most users can be a difficult job, especially if the necessary tools are not available.

Among the utilities that are designed for Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL) tasks Kettle - Spoon aims to offer an environment in which data integration is no longer an intimidating activity.

This software solution is ready to run as soon as it is unpacked, since it carries all its necessary dependencies with it. Nonetheless, some glitches may occur on some systems and because it is Java-based the stress on the system resources may increase noticeably

The interface is quite friendly and everything is well organized inside, so accessing all the functions of the program is pretty simple. The main window is divided into several areas so, on one hand, you have the pane that contains the viewing and design options and components and on the other there's the multi-tabbed workspace.

Kettle - Spoon works with jobs and transformations and you will be able to create, edit and manage them from the same place. In case you need to turn some data source into another format and export all the contained information into a more common format, you will have to resort to transformations.

Insofar as controlling these tasks sis concerned, the so-called 'jobs' can take care of that. More precisely, a job will be responsible with the transformation execution, as well as with the necessary notifications in case some errors occur.

Overall, Kettle - Spoon is definitely a tool for the advanced users. There is a lot of documentation available at the developer and inside the app, so any questions you might have concerning the way in which some function works or anything else related to the operation of this utility will have its answer in there.