# Merging many feature tables
**URL:** https://forum.qiime2.org/t/merging-many-feature-tables/2004
**Category:** Ideas and Suggestions
**Tags:** merge
**Created:** [November 28, 2017, 4:25pm UTC](https://forum.qiime2.org/t/merging-many-feature-tables/2004 "2017-11-28T16:25:41Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 3
### Author:  [@ebolyen](https://forum.qiime2.org/u/ebolyen)
#### Post date: [November 29, 2017, 11:09pm UTC](https://forum.qiime2.org/t/merging-many-feature-tables/2004/3 "2017-11-29T23:09:03Z")
Hey @nick-youngblut!
> [@nick-youngblut](#):
>
> If there are many sequencing runs (eg., dozens for the dataset that I’m working on), the iterative merging leads to a lot of redundant qiime feature-table merge commands, or a somewhat complicated bash script to handle a dynamic number of feature tables to iteratively merge.
Most definitely! This has been a pain-point we've been pretty unhappy with and we are currently working on what's needed to avoid it.
> [@nick-youngblut](#):
>
> This shouldn’t be much extra code,
If only that was true ☹
Here's some PRs I'm working on to enable variadic input if you want to keep up to date with the latest progress:
>
>
> \`Set\` and \`List\` are no longer primitive types, they are collection types. This
> …
> means they can be used on primitives (with the exception of metadata) or
> semantic types. This enables variadic input artifacts in the framework.
>
> ~~\*\*This is still under-tested. I'm going to be making changes to the CLI to make sure this works before returning to this PR\*\*~~
[https://github.com/qiime2/q2view/pull/81](https://github.com/qiime2/q2view/pull/81)
>
That doesn't get into actually allow `feature-table merge` to accept multiple inputs, but once these PRs are merged we'll be able to get started on that!
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