How to Load Data from Salesforce to Redshift: 2 Easy Methods

If you’re using Salesforce to manage your customer data and Amazon Redshift for analytics, you might need to integrate the two to gain valuable insights. Salesforce is a powerhouse for CRM, but its data can be challenging to analyze without the right tools. That’s where Redshift comes in, providing a scalable data warehouse for deep analysis.

In this blog, I’ll walk you through two easy methods to load data from Salesforce to Redshift, making your integration process seamless and helping you unlock the full potential of your data.

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is one of the world’s most renowned customer relationship management platforms. Salesforce comes with a wide range of features that allow you to manage your key accounts and sales pipelines. While Salesforce does provide analytics within the software, many businesses would want to extract this data and combine it with data from other sources such as marketing, product, and more to get deeper insights on the customer. By bringing the CRM data into a modern data warehouse like Redshift, this can be achieved.

Key Features of Salesforce

Salesforce is one of the most popular CRM in the current business scenario and it is due to its various features. Some of these key features are:

• Easy Setup: Unlike most CRMs, which usually take up to a year to completely get installed and deployed, Salesforce can be easily set up from scratch within a few weeks only.
• Ease of Use: Businesses usually have to spend more time putting it to use and comparatively much lesser time in understanding how Salesforce works.
• Effective: Salesforce is convenient to use and can also be customized by businesses to meet their requirements. Due to this feature, users find the tool very beneficial.
• Account Planning: Salesforce provides you with enough data about each Lead that your Sales Team can customize their approach for every potential Lead. This will increase their chance of success and the customer will also get a personalized experience.
• Accessibility: Salesforce is a Cloud-based software, hence it is accessible from any remote location if you have an internet connection. Moreover, Salesforce has an application for mobile phones which makes it super convenient to use.

What is Redshift?

Amazon Redshift is essentially a storage system that allows companies to store petabytes of data across easily accessible “Clusters” that you can query in parallel. Every Amazon Redshift Data Warehouse is fully managed which means that administrative tasks like maintenance backups, configuration, and security are completely automated. 

Amazon Redshift is primarily designed to work with Big Data and is easily scalable due to its modular node design. It also allows users to gain more granular insight into datasets, owing to the ability of Amazon Redshift Clusters to be further divided into slices. Amazon Redshift’s multi-layered architecture allows multiple queries to be processed simultaneously thus cutting down on waiting times. Apart from these, there are a few more benefits of Amazon Redshift that are covered in the following section.

Key Features of Amazon Redshift

• Enhanced Scalability: Amazon Redshift is known for providing consistently fast performance, even in the face of thousands of concurrent queries.    
• Easy Management: Amazon Redshift automates oft-repeated maintenance tasks so that you can focus on gathering actionable insights from your data. It is fairly simple to set up and operate. A new Data Warehouse can be deployed with just a few clicks in the AWS console. Also, check out the Redshift Sortkeys article.
• Robust Security: Amazon Redshift is known for providing robust data security features at no extra cost. Amazon Redshift allows you to configure firewall rules to take control of network access to a specific Data Warehouse Cluster.   
• Data Lake and AWS Integrated: Amazon Redshift allows you to work with data in various open formats that can easily integrate with the AWS ecosystem. Amazon Redshift makes it exceptionally easy to query and write data to your Data Lake in open formats such as JSON, ORC, CSV, and Avro to name a few.      
• Flexible Performance: Amazon Redshift distinguishes itself by offering swift, industry-leading performance with a keen focus on flexibility. This is made possible through result caching, materialized views, efficient storage, RA3 instances, and high-performance query processing to name a few.

Let’s look more closely at both of these methods. Also before reading the methods, you can check our article on Salesforce connect.

What are the Methods to Connect Salesforce to Redshift?

Here are the methods you can use to connect Salesforce to Redshift in a seamless fashion:

• Method 1: Using Hevo to Move Data from Salesforce to Redshift
• Method 2: Using Data Loader Export Wizard to Move Data from Salesforce to Redshift

Method 1: Best Way to Move Data from Salesforce to Redshift: Using Hevo

You can connect Salesforce to Redshift in the following 2 steps:

• Step 1: Authenticate and configure your Salesforce data source as shown in the below image.

• Step 2: Load data from Salesforce to Redshift by providing your Redshift databases credentials like Database Port, Username, Password, Name, Schema, and Cluster Identifier along with the Destination Name.

By automating all the burdensome ETL tasks, Hevo will ensure that your Salesforce data is securely and reliably moved to Amazon Redshift in real-time.

Advantages of using Hevo

• Code-free ETL or ELT: You need not write and maintain any ETL scripts or cron jobs.
• Low set-up time: Data is copied in minutes once you have connected Salesforce to Redshift.
• 100% Data Accuracy: Hevo reliably delivers your data in real-time from Salesforce to Redshift. It’s AI-powered, the fault-tolerant architecture you will always have accurate and current data readily available.
• Automatic Schema Handling: Hevo does automatic schema detection, evolution, and mapping. The platform will detect any change in incoming Salesforce schema and make necessary changes in Redshift.
• Granular Activity Log and Monitoring: Your data flow is monitored in real-time, detailed activity logs are kept. You will also get timely alerts on Slack and email with status reports of data replication, detected schema changes, and more. Hevo’s activity log will let you observe user activities, transfer failures – successes, and more.
• Unmatched support: Hevo offers 24*7 support to all its customers via email 24×7 and on Slack.

There is a huge amount of flexibility you get from building your own custom solution to move data from Salesforce to Redshift for free. However, this comes with a high and ongoing cost in terms of engineering resources.

Method 2: Using Data Loader Export Wizard Move Data from Salesforce to Redshift

Let’s have a look at what is entailed in this process:

Step 1: Export Data from Salesforce using Data Loader Export Wizard

• Login to your Salesforce Account. Search Data export in the search bar.
• Choose a Salesforce object from which you want to export data. If the name of your object isn’t mentioned, choose Show all Salesforce Objects to view every object you have access to.
• You can export the data immediately or you can also schedule the export.

Step 2: Load Data to S3

• Open your Amazon S3 Console and on click on Create Bucket option.
• Now type in a unique S3 Bucket name and select a Region.
• Next, click on Create.
• Now, choose new bucket you just created, then click Actions button, and select Create Folder in the drop-down list. Name your folder.
• From the drop-down list, choose the name of the data folder you just entered.
• Now select Files wizard and choose Add Files.
• Select the Salesforce CSV file you downloaded and click on Start Upload.

Step 3: Move Data from S3 to Redshift

Run the Copy Command in Redshift to load data from S3 to Redshift.

COPY table_name [ column_list ] FROM data_source CREDENTIALS access_credentials [options] 

After this your data will be successfully loaded to Redshift Warehouse.

Limitations of using Manual Method to Move Data from Salesforce to Redshift

1. Manual effort: Requires repetitive manual tasks to export data from Salesforce and load it into Redshift, making it time-consuming.
2. Data size limitations: Salesforce Export Wizard has data size restrictions, which can make it difficult to export large datasets.
3. Lack of real-time updates: Manual exports don’t support real-time data syncing, leading to outdated information in Redshift.
4. Error-prone process: Manual data handling increases the chances of errors, such as missing or incorrect data during export/import.
5. No automation: The process lacks automation, requiring regular human intervention, which is inefficient for continuous data loading.

For an efficient ETL process from Salesforce to Redshift, choosing the right data integration tools can streamline data transfer, reduce manual effort, and enhance data reliability

Think about how you would:

1. Know if Salesforce has changed data?
2. Know when Redshift is not available for writing?
3. Find the resources to rewrite code when needed.
4. Find the resources to update the Redshift schema in response to new data requests.

Opting for Hevo cuts out all these questions. You will have fast and reliable access to analysis-ready data and you can focus your attention on finding meaningful insights.

Why Integrate Salesforce with Redshift?

By migrating your data from Salesforce to Redshift, you will be able to help your business stakeholders find the answers to these questions:

• What percentage of customers’ queries from a region are through email?
• The customers acquired from which channel have the maximum number of tickets raised?
• What percentage of agents respond to customers’ tickets acquired through the organic channel?
• Customers acquired from which channel have the maximum satisfaction ratings?
• How does customer SCR (Sales Close Ratio) vary by Marketing campaign?
• How does the number of calls to the user affect the activity duration with a Product?
• How does Agent performance vary by Product Issue Severity?

Following ETL best practices can optimize data migration from Salesforce to Redshift, ensuring data accuracy and minimizing latency during the transformation process.

Conclusion

This blog talks about the two methods you can use to move data from Salesforce to Redshift in a seamless fashion.

Hevo is a fault-tolerant, dependable Data Integration Platform. With Hevo you will work in an environment where you can securely move data from any source to any destination. In addition to Salesforce, you can load data from 150+ other sources using Hevo.

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