Rethinking joins

[Carluccio555]

So it has occured to me that the standard Join Tool is an inner join and it can therefore create more records than it has been fed.

If I want to create a join that is fed 100 records on the Left and will output those same exact 100 records but then creates a new column that has the corresponding Right matching data (where a match was found) What is the best approach?

[Felipe_Ribeir0 · Accepted solution]

Hi @Carluccio555 

Assuming that you want to bring these values from table B to table A (like a vlookup), you can remove duplicates on table B based on the join key and union L and J after the join

[apathetichell]

Unique takes the FIRST row where a unique value occurs. What you should really think about is "why do I have non-distinct data - and what are my distinct data subsets? How would I expect this to behave when there are multiple values."

Try the Find/Replace tool. That will not drop any of your original records.