Join/Append Field Issue

[George_Fischetti]

Hi Folks, hoping someone can help me sort out an issue I'm having with my Join/Append.   

I have a policy master file (MexMainframeOutput) and a Claim File (TomasaDataOutput).   I'm trying to tag each record from the policy master file that has a claim so I was appending the key field from the claim file to the master file so that I can extract later.

When I do this I'm seeing my number of records multipy, by A LOT!  (see screen print).   I had the same issue when I used the join.  What am I doing wrong??

Appreciate the help.

George

[gabrielvilella · Accepted solution]

Hi @George_Fischetti, be careful when using the Append Fields tool with multiple records on the S anchor. This tool does a combination of all records from the T table with all records from the S table. If you have 10 records on T and 3 on S, the result will be 10*3=30 records. 

For your use case I believe you need to use the Join tool to get one column from another table based on a key field. Kind of the logic as if you were using Vlookup on Excel, for instance. If you see that your number of records is increasing with the Join, this means that you have duplicates on that key field on both tables. You can use a Unique tool before the join to eliminate those duplicates. 

Example:

[George_Fischetti]

@gabrielvilella thank you, I thought this could be part of the issue but I'm new to Alteryx and wasn't certain of the behavoir of some of these tools.  Ultimately the data folks gave us the wrong dataset as there shouldn't have been any duplicates.  I really appreciate your input!!  Thank you!!