title: Using Pentaho as XML ETL tool
body: <p>I know nothing about Pentaho and I just want to know whether it can do my job before I commit a lot of time to learn it. </p>
  
  <p>Can Pentaho be used as an XML ETL tool? Can it achieve arbitrary transformation? A typical transformation would be to collapse XML element "Company" and its child element "Employee" into the same "Employee" table, but this is just the simplest transformation and there are infinite other possibilities. For example, to import following XML into our database:</p>
  
  <pre><code>    &lt;Root&gt;
         &lt;OrdersByCustomer&gt;
          &lt;CustomerInfo&gt;
            &lt;Customer&gt;
              &lt;CustomerID&gt;1234&lt;/CustomerID&gt;
              ...
            &lt;/Customer&gt;
            &lt;Address&gt;...&lt;/Address&gt;
          &lt;/CustomerInfo&gt;
          &lt;Orders&gt;
            &lt;Order&gt;...&lt;/Order&gt;
            &lt;Order&gt;...&lt;/Order&gt;
            &lt;Order&gt;...&lt;/Order&gt;
          &lt;/Orders&gt;
        &lt;/ OrdersByCustomer&gt;
      &lt;/Root&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I need to pickup the CustomerID and insert it together with the data inside XML element "Order". </p>
  
  <p>Can Pantaho do such infinite and arbitrary transformation? Or do I have to cut my own code?</p>
  
  <p>If the answer to the above question is yes, then, two more questions:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>Is Pentaho symmetric and bidirectional? We not only need to import XML into our database, we also need to generate XML from data in our database. Can Pentaho do that?</p></li>
  <li><p>If the answer is again yes, I know Pentaho is a framework and there are books written about it. Do I need to learn the whole framework, or can I just install it, spend half a day to only learn the XML ETL part, and start using it?</p></li>
  </ol>