DBUnit is oooooooooooooooold and hasn't been updated in forever, but still quasi-useful. It never had an official way of loading spreadsheets based on the absolute path of a flie name; paths were always relative to its own class context. Snippets load a spreadsheet using DBUnit specified by an absolute file path, and then demonstrate what a setu…

DatabaseTester.java

private static IDatabaseTester databaseTester;
@Resource
protected ComboPooledDataSource dataSource;

@Before //You can use @BeforeClass if dataSource isn't loaded by dependency injection
public void setupDatabase() throws Exception {
    if(databaseTester == null) { //Only load once, this can be removed if using @BeforeClass
        databaseTester = new DataSourceDatabaseTester(dataSource);
        IDataSet dataSet = new XlsDataFileLoader().load("TestDAO-data.xls");
        databaseTester.setDataSet(dataSet);
        databaseTester.onSetup();
    }
}

@AfterClass
public static void shutdownDatabase() throws Exception {
    databaseTester.onTearDown();
}

XlsDataFileLoader.java

public class XlsDataFileLoader extends org.dbunit.util.fileloader.XlsDataFileLoader {
    public IDataSet load(String path) throws DatabaseUnitRuntimeException {
        URL url = this.getClass().getResource(path);

        if (url == null)
            throw new DatabaseUnitRuntimeException("Could not find file " + path);

        IDataSet dataSet = new DefaultDataSet();
        try {
            dataSet = loadDataSet(url);
            dataSet = processReplacementTokens(dataSet);
        } catch (DataSetException ex) {
            throw new DatabaseUnitRuntimeException(String.format("Error loading data from %s: %s", path, ex.getLocalizedMessage()), ex);
        } catch (IOException ex) {
            throw new DatabaseUnitRuntimeException("Error reading " + path, ex);
        }

        return dataSet;
    }
}