Concepts

Sync types

The fundamental choice to make in Polytomic is whether to use Model Syncs or Bulk Syncs:

• Use Bulk Syncs if you want to sync untransformed data into SQL databases, data warehouses, spreadsheets, and cloud storage systems like S3 (this is the ‘ELT’ pattern: Extract, Load, and Transform).

• Use Model Syncs for all other use cases:

  • Syncing data to business systems like Salesforce, HubSpot, NetSuite, and so on.
  • Transforming data at the source (e.g. with custom SQL) before syncing it into any destination (including data warehouses).

Model Syncs require defining a data model first. A data model is a reusable view of fields from your source, either defined literally or through a transformation query (SQL, MongoDB, CosmosDB, Salesforce’s SOQL, etc).