Looking for values in a variety of sources

The first recipes in the chapter showed you how to look for additional information in a database. There are still many other sources of information. You may need to look in property files, in Excel files, in text files, and so on. Kettle allows you to look for data coming from all those sources with the Stream lookup step.

In this example, you have information about books coming from an Excel file and you need to complete this dataset by looking up the author's data and genre description, which are in external sources. In this case, the author's information is inside a text file and the genres are in a fixed predefined list.

Getting ready

For doing this recipe, you will need the following:

• A CSV file (authors.txt) with the author's data. The file should have the following columns: lastname, firstname, nationality, and id_author. The following are sample lines of this file:

  "lastname","firstname","nationality","id_author"
  "Larsson","Stieg","Swedish",...