The Pairwise Overlay toolset exists to provide an alternative to the tools in the Overlay toolset. You may want to consider using these tools when
- your input data is extremely large (hundreds of millions of input features) containing complex overlapping of features,
- you execute the Intersect tool found in the Overlay toolset and your seemingly simple inputs result in an output with multitudes more features than were in the inputs (inputs contained tens of thousands of features and the result is tens or hundreds of million features),
- the Intersect tool in the Overlay toolset takes a very long time to complete (tens of hours or days), or
- you desire a more simple output for your analysis.
| Tool | Description |
|---|---|
|
Creates buffer polygons around input features to a specified distance using a parallel processing approach and takes advantage of parallel processing. | |
Aggregates features based on specified attributes using a parallel processing approach. | |
Computes a pairwise intersection of the input features. Features or portions of features that overlap between the input feature layers or feature classes are written to the output feature class. Pairwise intersection refers to selecting one feature from the first input and intersecting it with all those features in the second input that it overlaps. |