Salesforce is one of the world’s most popular CRM (customer relationship management) software platforms, helping businesses of all sizes and industries beat their competitors and better serve their clients. But instead of keeping your Salesforce data inside the CRM platform itself, you can make better use of this information by moving it into a target data warehouse. The ETL (extract, transform, load) process combines your enterprise data from many sources, storing it in a centralized location for easier reporting and analytics.
Related Reading: Why You Should ETL Your Salesforce Data
In this article, we’ll show you how easy it is to create a Salesforce ETL pipeline so you can migrate your Salesforce data to a data warehouse or data lake for analytics and reporting.
How to Set Up a Salesforce ETL Pipeline
Before you start on your Salesforce ETL journey, you first need to decide what data you plan on using and how you plan on moving it. Consider the following questions:
Which Salesforce data will you move? Moving all of your Salesforce data with ETL is likely overkill, but moving too little will mean that your reporting and analytics workflows won't get the information they need. Typically, the best approach is to start small and expand your ETL consumption as you discover what you truly require.
How often will you migrate your Salesforce data? Since your customer databases could be constantly changing, frequent refreshes of your Salesforce data may be necessary. Also, consider that you may want to extract some of your Salesforce data and objects more frequently than others.
Once you’ve decided on a data governance policy for your Salesforce data, it’s time to start the migration process. It’s possible to write custom Salesforce ETL scripts that integrate your Salesforce data with your choice of data warehouse—but this would take much longer than 30 minutes and has several drawbacks:
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It's technically complex: Although more than 100,000 companies use Salesforce worldwide, not all of these organizations have the technical skillset and sophistication needed to write custom ETL scripts for their data.
It's resource-intensive: Even if you have in-house data integration experts available to work on this project, it’s time-consuming and can distract these employees from focusing on your core business functionality.
Instead of rolling your own custom Salesforce ETL implementation, it’s easier and more cost-effective to choose a Salesforce ETL tool like Integrate.io.
Salesforce ETL with Integrate.io
Integrate.io is a powerful yet user-friendly ETL and data integration platform for building data pipelines to your cloud data warehouse (e.g. Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse). The Integrate.io platform’s simple, drag-and-drop interface makes it easy for even non-technical users to build robust, production-ready ETL workflows.
One of the greatest benefits of tools like Integrate.io is the rich diversity of pre-built data connectors. Integrate.io comes with more than 100 built-in integrations for third-party SaaS applications, data stores, and analytics tools—including Salesforce.
Using Integrate.io’s Salesforce connector, you can extract your data from Salesforce databases and objects, and then load it into the destination of your choice for further analysis. To show you how to get started, we’ve created a three-minute YouTube video that demonstrates loading Salesforce data into an Amazon Redshift data warehouse. You can also follow along with the steps in this article:
- In the Integrate.io dashboard, click on the “Connections” lightning bolt icon on the top left.
- Click on the “New Connection” button, and select “Salesforce.”
- Select whether you’re connecting to a Salesforce production or sandbox environment.
- Sign in to your Salesforce account with your username and password.
- Click on “Allow” to grant Integrate.io access to your Salesforce account.
- Finally, name the connection and click on “Create Salesforce connection.”
All done—and within minutes under the 30-minute deadline.
How Integrate.io Can Help with Salesforce ETL
The benefits of Integrate.io for Salesforce ETL include:
Support for Salesforce Bulk API: The Salesforce Bulk API is a REST API from Salesforce optimized for loading extensive data sets. Integrate.io includes native support for the Salesforce Bulk API so that the extract phase of ETL uses as few Salesforce resources as possible.
Salesforce to Salesforce: Integrate.io supports Salesforce to Salesforce connections (i.e. sharing data between two different Salesforce organizations).
Pre-built integrations: No matter what you want to do with your Salesforce data or where you want to move it, Integrate.io’s pre-built integrations include support for the most popular data sources, relational databases, and target data warehouses.
No-code functionality: Integrate.io’s low-code and no-code capabilities allow anyone in the organization to define and execute the ETL processes you need to get your Salesforce data flowing. With a variety of pre-built data transformations, Integrate.io makes it simple to clean, edit, collate and modify your Salesforce data before loading it into your data warehouse.
Want to start your Salesforce ETL journey with Integrate.io? Get in touch with our team of data integration experts today for a chat about your business needs and objectives, or to start your 14-day pilot of the Integrate.io platform.