By providing counts of overlapping key fields among pairs of tables, Overlap analysis makes it safer to combine information in multiple tables into an analytic data set. For example, if an analytic data set is being built to describe customers, it is useful to know whether the customer, account, and transaction tables that provide information about customers actually refer to the same customers.
Given a column name and a list of table names, the Overlap analysis determines the number of instances of that column which the combination of tables have in common. The same may also be performed for multiple columns taken together.
The Overlap analysis is parameterized by specifying the table and columns to analyze, as well as specifying the desired results.