Introduction
With transformations, you manipulate data in many ways—doing mathematical or logical operations, applying string functions, grouping by one or more columns, sorting, and much more. Besides transforming the data you already have, you may need to search and bring data from other sources. Let us look at the following examples:
You have some product codes and you want to look for their descriptions in an Excel file
You have a value and want to get all products whose price is below that value from a database
You have some addresses and want to get the coordinates (latitude and longitude) for those locations from a web service
Searching for information in databases, text files, web services, and so on, is a very common task, and Kettle has several steps for doing it. In this chapter, you will learn about the different options.
