Tutorial: Designing your first job

This exercise walks you through the creation of a simple job.

The aim of the exercise is to get you familiar with the Designer client, so that you are confident to design more complex jobs. There is also a dedicated tutorial for parallel jobs, which goes into more depth about designing parallel jobs.

In this exercise you design and run a simple parallel job that reads data from a text file, changes the format of the dates that the file contains, and writes the transformed data back to another text file.

The source text file contains data from a wholesaler who deals in car parts. It contains details of the wheels they have in stock. The data is organized in a table that contains approximately 255 rows of data and four columns. The columns are as follows:

CODE: The product code for each type of wheel.
DATE: The date new wheels arrived in stock (given as year, month, and day).
PRODUCT: A text description of each type of wheel.
QTY: The number of wheels in stock.

The job that you create will perform the following tasks:

Extract the data from the file.
Convert (transform) the data in the DATE column from a complete date (YYYY-MM-DD) to a year and month (YYYY, MM) stored as two columns.
Write the transformed data to a new text file that is created when you run the job.

The following table shows a sample of the source data that the job reads.

Shows a sample of the exercise data before the job runs — Figure 1. Source data for exercise

The following table shows the same data after it has been transformed by the job.

Shows a sample of the exercise data after the job runs — Figure 2. Data after transformation by the job

Learning objectives

As you work through the exercise, you will learn how to do the following tasks:

Set up your project.
Create a new job.
Develop the job by adding stages and links and editing them.
Compile the job.
Run the job.

Time required

This exercise takes approximately 60 minutes to finish. If you explore other concepts related to this exercise, it could take longer to complete.

Audience

New user of IBM® Information Server.

System requirements

The exercise requires the following hardware and software:

IBM InfoSphere® DataStage® clients installed on a Windows XP platform.
Connection to an engine tier on a Windows or UNIX platform (Windows servers can be on the same computer as the clients).

Prerequisites

Complete the following tasks before starting the exercise:

Obtain DataStage developer privileges from the InfoSphere DataStage administrator.
Find out the name of the project that the administrator has created for you to work in.
Set up the exercise data as described in the first lesson.

Setting up the exercise
Before you begin the exercise, you must copy the data that you will use to a folder.
Starting the Designer client
The first step is to start the Designer client.
Setting up your project
The next step is to set up your project by defining the data that you will use.
Creating a new job
The first step in designing a job is to create an empty job and save it to a folder in the repository.
Adding stages and links to your job
You add stages and links to the job that you created. Stages and links are the building blocks that determine what the job does when it runs.
Configuring your job
The next step is configuring your job and defining what tasks it will perform.
Compiling your job
You compile the job to prepare it to run on your system.
Running your job and viewing results
In this lesson, you use the Director client to run the job and to view the log that the job produces as it runs. You also use the Designer client to look at the data that is written by the sample job.