Configuring Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) on Windows

Configuring Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) / Kettle community edition on Windows:

This short tutorial will focus on Setting up a PDI server to ingest data from RangerMSP into Neo4j.
You should first setup and configure a working Neo4j 4.x server (it can be on the same server).  

What you need to before you begin

System Requirements: Prepare Windows for Install Virtually all modern desktop/server OS are supported JAVA x64 (OpenJDK/OracleJDK) 8.x Neo4j Server, Developer or Desktop Edition Pentaho 9.x Community Edition Download here Be aware the latest neo4j DB (4.x) requires JAVA 11.  PDI requires 8, so you will need to install BOTH!

1. Verify the JAVA_HOME system variable.  For my installation I used the OpenJDK so the path was C:\Program Files\AdoptOpenJDK\jre-8.0.265.01-hotspot
   
   
2. Extract the archive into the folder you want to be your installation folder
   
   
3. Navigate to the installation folder and run spoon.bat
   
   
   
   
   
4. IF you see the _PENTAHO_JAVA variable point to a JAVA version other than 8 then prepend a proper path to the JAVA version 8 at the beginning of the spoon.bat:
   
   

   SET JAVA_HOME =C:\Program Files\AdoptOpenJDK\jre-8.0.265.01-hotspot
   
   
5. BE PATIENT.  It takes a little while to load.  After a moment you should see the Pentaho Data Integration splash screen:
   
   

   
   
   This will stay on the screen for a minute or so, and then the program will finish loading.
   If all went well you should now see the welcome screen:
   
   
   
   
   
   
6. Ok - now we need some connectivity.  You want to query a Microsoft SQL Server database right?   Of course you do!  Why not?
   
   First Download the Microsoft JDBC driver for MS SQL Server.
   
   Extract the contents.
   
   
7. Copy the mssql-jdbc.x.y.z.jre8.jar into the \lib folder of your PDI installation folder (assuming you are using JAVA JRE/JDK v8.  That's it!  next time you launch spoon it will have the SQL jdbc driver available.
   
   For some more data connectivity examples see the following:
   

• Configuring Neo4j 4.x data connectivity in PDI
• Configuring RangerMSP (Advantage SQL) data connectivity in PDI