Reverse ETL

Reverse ETL is ingestion in the other direction: instead of pulling data into your warehouse, ingestr pushes rows from the warehouse back into an operational tool — a CRM, a marketing app — through that tool's API.

• The warehouse stays the source of truth.
• Any ingestr source can feed a reverse-ETL destination.
• Rows are read the same way as any other run (full table, or a window via incremental loading). Only the destination changes: each row becomes an API call, not a row in a table.

How it's different from a warehouse destination

A warehouse destination stages data, runs SQL, and swaps tables. A reverse-ETL destination does none of that:

• No staging table, no SQL, no atomic swap.
• Each source row is written to the target API as one record (or one link). It usually affects a single remote record, but not always — matching on a non-unique field can update or delete every record that matches (see Matching records).
• Rows are sent in bulk through the API's batch endpoints, within its rate limits.

Two things follow from this:

• The API decides what's possible. Which strategies work and what you can match on depend entirely on the target API. ingestr only exposes what the API actually supports.
• Writes aren't transactional. A run that fails partway may already have written some records, and ingestr can't roll them back. It reports the rows the API rejected (see --reject-mode).

Supported destinations

Destination	What you can write
HubSpot	CRM records (contacts, companies, deals, custom objects) and associations
CleverTap	User profiles and events
Salesforce	sObject records (standard and custom objects)
Attio	Object records (people, companies, deals, custom objects)

Each destination's page has its own URI, object types, and quirks. This page covers what they share.

Strategies

Pick the write behaviour with --incremental-strategy. There's often no sensible default, so some destinations require it explicitly. Where a destination honours the strategy, the names map to API operations like this:

• merge — upsert: update the match, or create it if there's none. The usual choice.
• update — update matches only; a row with no match is rejected, never created.
• append — always create. Re-running duplicates rows unless you scope each run to new rows.
• delete — remove the matches. Whether that's a soft-delete (archive, recoverable) or a hard-delete (permanent) depends on the destination — some APIs only offer one. Check its page.
• replace — mirror: upsert every source row, then remove anything not in the source, using the same delete semantics as delete.

Notes:

• Not every destination supports every strategy — check its page.
• Impossible combinations are rejected before the run starts, not silently mishandled.
• --full-refresh isn't supported: there's no table to rebuild, and it would turn any strategy into a replace. To remove records that aren't in the source, use --incremental-strategy replace.
• Some destinations allow one strategy per table. CleverTap, for example, only upserts profiles (merge) and only appends events (append); that strategy is also the default, and any other stops the run before anything is sent.

WARNING

On a destination that supports deletion, replace removes every record that isn't in your source — including ones created by hand or by other tools. Use it only when the source is the complete system of record. A run with 0 source rows removes nothing (a safety guard). To remove specific records, use delete.

Matching records

merge, update, and delete need to find the existing record. That's two separate things:

• Remote field to match on — a destination-side property, set on --dest-table (e.g. id_property=email for HubSpot). Each destination names this parameter after its own API, so Salesforce calls it external_id. Check the destination's page for the name it uses.
• Source column with the value — set with --primary-key.

They're independent — --dest-table "contacts?id_property=email" --primary-key customer_email matches the email property against your customer_email column.

The exact identity rules differ per destination — what counts as a valid match field, and whether more than one key is allowed, depends on the API. See each page.

Shared flags

Both flags apply only to reverse-ETL destinations. On a warehouse destination they're rejected.

--reject-mode

What happens to a row the API can't apply (no match, or rejected on its value). All three modes write the valid rows they process — they differ in how far they get and in the exit status:

• fail (default) — send every valid row, then fail at the end listing the rejects.

• fail_fast — stop at the first bad row; valid rows before it are written, rows after it aren't sent.

• skip — send every valid row, report the rejects, exit 0.

• Only per-record problems are skippable. Systemic failures (auth, malformed request) always abort, whatever the mode.

--write-nulls

What a NULL source cell does to a field:

• true (default) — write it through, clearing the field.
• false (--write-nulls=false) — omit the cell, leaving the stored value untouched.

Only affects strategies that write field values (merge, update, append, replace). No effect on delete, or on writes that don't carry editable fields.

Column mapping

Rename a column to a differently-named property with --columns, using dest_property::source_column:

--columns 'firstname::first_name,lifecyclestage::status'

• Rename only — reverse-ETL destinations own their property types. Some destinations reject an entry that carries a type; check its page.
• --primary-key can name either the source column or its new name. With --columns 'Ext_Id__c::customer_ref', both --primary-key Ext_Id__c and --primary-key customer_ref work.
• Whether an unknown property is accepted also depends on the destination: some create attributes on the fly, others require the property to already exist. Check its page.

Example

Upsert warehouse contacts into HubSpot, matching on email:

ingestr ingest \
  --source-uri "bigquery://my-project/analytics?credentials_path=/creds.json" \
  --source-table "analytics.customers" \
  --dest-uri "hubspot://?api_key=pat-xxxx" \
  --dest-table "contacts?id_property=email" \
  --primary-key email \
  --incremental-strategy merge

Swap the destination URI and table for CleverTap — see each destination's page for the object types and parameters specific to it.