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 Multiple Joins / Add a joined table as existing data source

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Apptio Community Member's profile image
Apptio Community Member posted Mon June 21, 2021 08:01 AM
Basically I have 2 questions:
1. Can you perform multiple joins in the same table, meaning - If you have table A, can you join it with table B and then with table C and then with table D... and so on?
2. When I add table B (which contains data of table B joined with table C) as an existing table data source for table A, should I get the original table B data or the actual table B joined with table C data? Currently it is showing me only table B data, but I am assuming it is some sort of a bug.
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Renee Daignault's profile image
Renee Daignault posted Tue June 22, 2021 11:37 AM  Best Answer
I also agree with Debbie, I do think you could use an append table. For example create an excel file with all the headers you will need in the table. Upload the excel headers into desired New Table. Then for your second step in the transformation pipeline use the append and bring in tables A, B and C and match on the column headers. Once all the data is in the table you could then use lookup formulas to overwrite all of columns to lookup the data, if the lookups are coming from other data sources, not those being appended. Because that would give you a circular reference. 

Or are you using table A to populate B to populate C? If you are then you will, like Debbie mentioned, need to create transforms to create copies of tables to help the lookup function and not create circular references.
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Renee Daignault's profile image
Renee Daignault posted Mon June 21, 2021 12:40 PM
Hello Saaraunsh - 
1. In one table you can only have 1 join. Joining table A with B and then B with C and so on, I would imagine would get tricky also I would be worried about a performance issue. I am not saying it would cause performance issues, but it could be a potential issue. 
2. I would need more information to determine if we would need a support ticket for a bug. I would check the source input/output selections in all the table transforms to start. I would unjoin B and C. Test with the join A to B. 

I do have a question - what is your end goal for the joins of these tables? What is the output you are looking for?
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Apptio Community Member's profile image
Apptio Community Member posted Tue June 22, 2021 05:25 AM
@Renee Daignault
1. Thanks for the clarification
2. ​Let me see if I can clarify more. I have a table A, which I join with table B. Now, I have another table C which I want to further join with the combined output of A and B. Since I joined table A with B, I would assume table A now contains the joined data of A and B. However, when I add table A as an existing source to by table C, it only considers the original table A columns (the ones before the join), whereas my expectation is it should take the final joined  A and B. Let me know if this is clear.

The reason for joining 3-4 tables is a requirement that we have to create a table/report in Apptio for a team, because the source data resides in Apptio, and it is always up to date.
I have achieved this using the LOOKUP() formula as joins didn't help at all. Using lookup is hectic when you have 15-20 columns from other table. I would have preferred a join in such cases.
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Debbie Hagen's profile image
Debbie Hagen posted Tue June 22, 2021 10:36 AM
Hello Saaraunsh,
Is there a reason you didn't append the 3 tables together rather than doing multiple lookups or joins? If you need separate copies of each as well, you could create a transform of one, then append the other two data sets.
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