Occasionally you may see one of these errors from the Join Multiple tool. It is a result of Cartesian joins.
Alteryx Designer
A Cartesian join is when you join every row of one table to every row of another table. You can also get one by joining every row of a table to every row of itself. A Cartesian join is very CPU intensive.
For example, if you have four files and each file has the same ID in it twice, that means it will join 2*2*2*2 times on the ID (the field on which you're joining is the key referenced in the error; in this example, it's Field1, and the duplicated value is 12345). The same can be caused by multiple nulls in each file.
After your data prep and investigation, and when you know your data are correct, your choices on how to handle Cartesian joins include:
- Allow multidimensional joins: The multidimensional join will occur with no error or warning reported.
- Warn on multidimensional joins of more than 16 records: A warning will be reported in the Results window that a multidimensional join has occurred.
- Error on multidimensional joins of more than 16 records: An error will be reported in the Results window that a multidimensional join has occurred and downstream processing will stop.