Joins allow you to examine relationships between two or more real entities, no matter what the original data source. Venn diagrams and Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERD) are available to help you to better visualize joins.
Joins give you insight into possible issues that might arise when you attempt to join data in your environment. For example, you can isolate issues related to duplicate or orphaned records (rows), allowing you to design error handling procedures before merging your data.
N-way joins offer another way of working with join analysis, allowing you to join two entities at a time to create one or more output entities based on one or more result segments. These output entities can be joined again with other entities to create multi-way joins.
Configuring N-way joins creates Join projects which can contain multiple joins, join entities, and join processes. A join project is configured as a graphic flow (like a Quality Process Flow) to better view and analyze N-way join relationships.
The following are other analysis tasks you can perform:
Data Assessment
As you examine joins, you may also want to assess the suitability of that data for integration or cleansing processes which involve merges or joins between files and/or database tables.
Disparate File Assessment
Depending on your data profiling needs, you may want to examine relationships between disparate files and tables. For example, COBOL files merging with Oracle database tables.
To help you anticipate the results of a data join or merge, you can perform 'what if' scenarios on selected files or tables that you would include in a join or merge process.
Migration and Integration Projects
When planning a migration or integration project, often the source data is in a different format than the target data. Some of your data integration projects may require that you take source data from multiple source entities and perform merges and data transformations that result in the data being placed in a single target entity.