The leading no-code writeback solution in Power BI: Explore comprehensive writeback options in Inforiver Matrix

Inforiver Writeback Matrix features a decoupled architecture, making it possible to completely separate your front-end applications from the storage layer. This means total flexibility to writeback to your data platform of choice.  

• Seamless migration: Migrate from an on-prem data warehouse like SQL Server to a cloud data platform like Fabric with zero downtime. Switching between writing to Snowflake today and Databricks tomorrow with just a configuration change is simple and straightforward.  
  
• Ease of use: Business users can enter budgets/comments/forecasts in an Excel-like interface and persist the data to the preferred data platform in a single click.  
  
• Simultaneous writeback: The Writeback Matrix has powerful parallel processing capabilities - for example, writeback to Dataverse, Azure data lake, or Oracle destinations in one shot. 

Inforiver Writeback Matrix offers 3 modes:
Manual Writeback, Auto-Writeback, and Scheduled Writeback.  

We’ll take a deep dive into each of these. 

1. Manual Writeback 

As the name implies, users need to click the Writeback button on the Export ribbon to initiate a writeback. Even report users can trigger writeback if the authors have given permission from the Allowed User Controls menu. Learn more about allowing report users to writeback and Writeback in reading view.

Under the hood, all the cells in the Inforiver visual are written back to the configured data platform. Inforiver compares the dimensions in writeback rows against what is already saved in the database. If the dimensions match, the existing row in the database is overwritten or updated; otherwise, a new row is inserted. 

Recommended usage:  

• Manual writeback is ideal for smaller data volumes. Since all the cells in the visual are sent to the data platform, an upper limit of 30,000 cells in the report is suggested for optimal performance.  
• When the business case demands manual intervention - for example, sales reps may enter numbers in the visual which their manager reviews periodically, say at the close of business or the end of the week. Managers can trigger writeback and save the data after completing verifications and validations. 

2. Auto-writeback 

You can enable auto-writeback when you want to instantly capture and save any updates made to data input fields or simulations. Inforiver detects when a user updates a field and automatically initiates writeback. Please bear in mind that auto-writeback can only be used with database destinations. 

Enabling auto-writeback: Navigate to Writeback Settings > Date and check the Enable Automatic Writeback option. 

Behind the scenes, Inforiver Matrix captures the changed records only (instead of all the data in the visual) and writes them to the database. You can set a time delay to control the interval between data updates and the initiation of the writeback process. Navigate to Advanced Data Settings to configure the debounce time. 

Recommended usage:  

• Auto writeback is a perfect fit for high-volume reports. Only the changed cells are written back, ensuring improved performance. 
• When any adjustments/updates have to be captured in real-time and saved to the writeback database.
• Explicit data validation is not required, and an automated means to commit the data to the writeback DB is preferred.  
• Business requires that the writeback destination is in sync with the report. 
  

3. Scheduled writeback 

You can configure a daily/weekly/monthly schedule and Inforiver will take care of the rest. Inforiver will load the report and automatically trigger writeback at the specified time. Navigate to Writeback Settings > Advanced Settings > Schedule Writeback to create a schedule. 

In the background, scheduled writebacks behave like manual writebacks, with all the data in the visual being saved to the data platform. Scheduled writebacks, however, don’t require any manual effort and will be triggered as per the scheduled frequency. 

Recommended usage:  

• Business requires that the writeback database is periodically refreshed with the latest report data at scheduled intervals. 
• Power BI dataset refresh or other pipeline activities happen at regular intervals, thus demanding the writeback updates to align with these processes to ensure the latest data is captured. 

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