Socrata was acquired by Tyler Technologies in 2018 and is now the Data and Insights division of Tyler. The platform is still powered by the same software formerly known as Socrata but you will see references to Data & Insights going forward.

Pentaho Kettle ETL Toolkit

The City of Chicago has generously released and documented their fully open source Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) toolkit and framework that uses Pentaho’s open source data integration tool (Kettle) to automatically publish data to the citiy’s Socrata Open Data Portal. The toolkit provides several utilities and a framework to help governments deploy automated ETLs using the open-source Pentaho data integration (Kettle) software.

This toolkit includes the following functionality:

  • Loading data from a database and uploading it to a Socrata data portal
  • Integrates with an SMTP server to provide e-mail alerts on the outcome of ETL scripts to administrators
  • Handles deployment issues when using multiple operating systems during development
  • Utilities to allow administrators to quickly analyze the log files of ETLs for quick diagnostics

Since this framework is based on Pentaho Kettle it provides the means to extract and transform data from a variety of data sources such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, a variety of NoSQL, APIs, text files, etc.

For more information and getting set up with the framework refer to: