Each Inflection object has specific schema requirements for the source DW table, so be sure to read these requirements carefully before connecting to the DW. The DW sources for these objects can be either views or tables in the DW. For the purposes of this document we will refer to the source DW entities generally as “tables”, although views are also equally supported and have the same schema requirements as tables.
There is no limit to the number of DW connections. With the exception of Product Activity, each Inflection object can only be connected to one DW table, but each Inflection object can be connected to other sources like SFDC and Segment in addition to one DW table. For example, the Inflection Contact can be connected to a Redshift table, Segment, and SFDC, while the Inflection Org is connected to Snowflake or a second Redshift instance. Product Activity can be sync’d to a single table or a table for each product event.
Fields mapped from a DW to Inflection are connected in one direction only, Inflection will read the field from the DW and write it to the mapped Inflection field, but any updates to this field in Inflection will not be written back to the DW. For this reason, we advice treating these fields as DW only fields in Inflection and not updating them from other sources (like SFDC, forms, etc)
Inflection supports both 1:many and many:many relationships between Contacts and Organizations. Use many:many if a single email address can belong to many different organizations within your product. If an email address can only belong to one organization in your product, then use 1:many. Contact Inflection support ([email protected]) for help setting up this mapping.
Unlike many other services, Inflection is built to handle massive scale when connecting data sources. We recommend syncing ALL product users (people using your product) and org data to Inflection. As for Product Activity, we recommend syncing all the product activity data that might someday be used by the marketing, growth, sales, and success teams. Some events, like debugging, logging, or internal engineering events need not be sync’d and will only clutter the Inflection instance for the GTM teams using Inflection. When in doubt, we recommend syncing more data so the Inflection users can work autonomously and not have to request work from your data or engineering teams.
Inflection currently supports importing data from the following data warehouses:
Contacts in Inflection represent a person and are unique by email address. Any DW table mapped to Contacts needs to also be unique by email address (no duplicate email addresses in the email column of the DW table). Inflection supports multiple product users to have the same email address across multiple orgs with the Product User object. In addition to uniqueness by email, any DW table that is connected to the Inflection Contact object must have the following schema restrictions:
email_address field is unique & required. If the email_address is null, we will not sync that row.