Export modes — which one do I pick?

Every export declares a mode:. Start from the decision shortcut, then open the guide for the mode you land on.

Decision shortcut

Small-to-medium table, want a fresh snapshot every run → full
Append-only or has an updated_at, want only new/changed rows → incremental
Millions+ of rows, want speed and crash-resume → chunked
Only the last N days matter (event/log table) → time_window
Continuous low-latency replication from the WAL / binlog / oplog → cdc

When in doubt, rivet init inspects the table and picks a sensible default for you (small → full, large with an integer key → chunked).

Mode	Use when	Keeps state?	Parallel?	First run
full	complete snapshot each run	no (stateless)	no	exports everything
incremental	only rows past the saved cursor	yes (cursor)	no	exports everything, then deltas
chunked	tables too large for one `full` scan	yes (checkpoint, `--resume`)	yes	full, split into ranges
time_window	rolling N-day window	no (recomputed each run)	no	the window only
cdc	continuous log-based change capture	yes (resume checkpoint)	yes (multiplexed streams)	optional initial snapshot, then stream

Notes worth knowing before you run:

incremental first run = full export. With no cursor yet, every matching row is exported, so the first run behaves like full — size batch_size accordingly (incremental.md).
chunked clean re-runs are NOT idempotent. A crash + --resume is at-least-once: a re-run chunk can be written twice (byte-identical), so de-duplicate downstream if you re-run (chunked.md).
Composite cursors are an incremental variant, not a separate mode — see incremental-coalesce.md when one timestamp column isn’t enough.
Source engine matters. The SQL sources (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server) support every mode. MongoDB, a document store, supports only full (with keyset / parallel / resume paging on _id) and cdc — see ../reference/mongodb.md.

Full configuration reference: ../reference/.