What is a Join?

Joins are used as a way to extend a primary set of entries with attributes from other objects. In general, joins are a way to provide additional context at the level of an entry. Take a person entry as an example; the more attributes available in the person’s entry offers more context about that person (personal information, projects they are working on, who their manager is…etc.). Joins are a well-known operation in the relational database world, and allow for bringing together columns from different tables where there is a common key/link between the objects being joined.

What does Join have to do with the Identity Data Fabric?

Now, expand this concept to joining overlapping identities across distributed, heterogeneous data silos that you would find across a typical large enterprise. First, SQL joins aren’t going to be sufficient because not every identity silo understands SQL. Second, since data silos store identity information differently, having a single matching key and value for overlapping identities can be difficult to achieve. A true identity unification platform must be able to accurately link overlapping identities, perform the distributed join required to build a complete global profile, and create the unique reference list of identities that eliminates duplicates.