An overview of the Overlay Operations toolset

The Overlay Operations toolset provides a series of tools that allows you to perform some basic overlay operations on the layers. This toolset includes tools that will allow you to perform erase, identity, update, intersect and near operations.

The following table lists the tools available in the Overlay Operations toolset and provides a brief description of each.

Tool	Description
Create Intersection Points	Intersects two input layers and outputs intersection points.
Erase Features	Creates a new feature class by overlaying two feature layers. The erase polygon features define the erasing region. Input features that are within the erasing region are removed. The output feature class contains only those input features that are outside the erasing region.
Identity	Creates a new feature class by overlaying two feature layers, one of which is a polygon layer. Input features can be points, polylines, or polygons. Overlay features must be polygons. Output features resulting from the overlay are of the same type as the Input features. Attribute table of the Output feature class contains all selected fields from the Input and Overlay layers attribute tables. Selecting only the fields that you need in the output feature class may significantly speed up processing.
Update Polygon Layer	Creates a new feature class by overlaying two feature layers. The Overlay features define the updating extent. Update uses the updating extent in a "cut-and-paste" operation. Both the Input and Overlay features must be polygons. Overlay features replace the area they overlap in the Input feature class. The result is stored in a new Output feature class. Attributes of the Input features are maintained in the Output feature class. Each polygon in the Overlay feature class will have one record in the Output feature class. Attributes of the Overlay features will be transferred to the Output feature class, for those fields that have names and field types that match a field name and type in the Input feature class. Update operation is similar to Erase, except that the Input features that overlap the updating extent are updated instead of being erased.
Near	Finds the nearest features from the same or other near datasets and calculates distances and additional proximity details.