How to Migrate Data from Salesforce to BigQuery?

Unlock the full potential of your Salesforce data by integrating it seamlessly with BigQuery. With Hevo’s automated pipeline, get data flowing effortlessly—watch our 1-minute demo below to see it in action!

Bringing your key sales, marketing and customer data from Salesforce to BigQuery is the right step towards building a robust analytics infrastructure. By merging this information with more data points available from various other data sources used by your business, you will be able to extract deep actionable insights that grow your business. Before we jump into the details, let us briefly understand each of these systems.

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, 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 BigQuery, this can be achieved. You can also connect your Salesforce account to Power BI to directly visualize your customer data.

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 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.
• ETL Capabilities: Salesforce connects seamlessly with other tools and this can be performed easily with the help of Snowflake ETL Tools.
• 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 Google BigQuery?

Google BigQuery is a completely managed cloud data warehouse platform offered by Google. It is based on Google’s famous Dremel Engine. Since BigQuery is based on a serverless model, it provides you high level of abstraction. Since it is a completely managed warehouse, companies do not need to maintain any form of physical infrastructure and database administrators. BigQuery comes with a pay-as-you-go pricing model and allows to pay only for the queries run. is also very cost-effective as you only pay for the queries you run. These features together make BigQuery a very sought-after data warehouse platform. You can read more about the key features of BigQuery here.

This blog covers two methods of loading data from Salesforce to Google BigQuery. The article also sheds light on the advantages/disadvantages of both approaches. This would give you enough pointers to evaluate them based on your use case and choose the right direction.

What are the Methods to Connect Salesforce to BigQuery?

There are several approaches to migrate Salesforce data to BigQuery. Salesforce bigquery connector is commonly integrated to analyze and visualize Salesforce data in a BigQuery environment. Let us look at both approaches to connect Salesforce to BigQuery in a little more detail:

Method 1: Simplest Way to Move data from Salesforce to BigQuery using Hevo

Step 1: Configure Salesforce as Source

Learn more about configuring Salesforce from our documentation page

Step 2: Configure BigQuery as your destination.

Learn more about configuring BigQuery as destination.

Hevo’s visual interface gives you a hassle-free means to quickly and easily migrate from Salesforce to BigQuery and also for free. Without any coding, all your Salesforce data will be ready for analysis within minutes.

Method 2: Move Data from Salesforce to BigQuery using Custom Scripts

• The first step would be to decide what data you need to extract from the API and Salesforce has an abundance of APIs.
  • Salesforce REST APIs
  • Salesforce Bulk APIs
  • Salesforce SOAP APIs
  • Salesforce Streaming APIs
    You may want to use Salesforce’s streaming API, so your data is always current.
• Transform your data:
  Once you have extracted the data using one of the above approaches, you would need to do the following:
  • BigQuery supports loading data in CSV and JSON formats. If the API you use returns data in formats other than these (eg: XML), you would need to transform them before loading. 
  • You also need to make sure your data types are supported by BIgQuery. Use this link BigQuery data types to learn more about BigQuery data types.
• Upload the prepared data to Google Cloud Storage
• Load to BigQuery from your GCS bucket using BigQuery’s command-line tool or any cloud SDK.

Salesforce to BigQuery: Limitations in writing Custom Code

• When writing and managing API scripts you need to have the resources for coding, code reviews, test deployments, and documentation.
• Depending on the use cases developed by your organization, you may need to amend API scripts; change the schema in your data warehouse; and make sure data types in source and destination match.
• You will also need to have a system for data validation. This would help you be at peace that data is being moved reliably.
• Each of these steps can make a substantial investment of time and resources. In today’s work setting, there are very few places with ‘standby’ resources that can take up the slack when major projects need more attention.

In addition to the above, you would also need to:

1. Watch out for Salesforce API for changes
2. Monitor GCS/BigQuery for changes and outages
3. Retain skilled people to rewrite or update the code as needed

If all of this seems like a crushing workload you could look at alternatives like Hevo. Hevo frees you from inspecting data flows, examining data quality, and rewriting data-streaming APIs. Hevo gives you analysis-ready data so you can spend your time getting real-time business insights.

Method 3: Using CSV/Avro 

This method involves using CSV/Avro files to export data from Salesforce into BigQuery. The steps are:

• Inside your Salesforce data explorer panel, select the table that you want to export your data. 
• Click on ‘Export to Cloud Storage’ and select CSV as the file type. Then, select the compression type as GZIP (GNU Zip) or go ahead with the default value.  
• Download that file to the system.
• Login to your BigQuery account. In the Data Explorer section, select “import” and choose “Batch Ingestion”.  
• Choose the file type as CSV/Avro. You can enable schema auto-detection or specify it specifically. 
• Add dataset and table name, and select “Import”. 

The limitation of the method is that it becomes complex if you have multiple tables/files to import. Same goes for more than one data sources with constantly varying data.

What are the Use cases for Migrating Salesforce to BigQuery?

Organizations use Salesforce’s Data Cloud along with Google’s BigQuery and Vertex AI to enhance their customer experiences and tailor interactions with them.  Salesforce BigQuery Integration enables organizations to combine and analyze data from their Salesforce CRM system with the powerful data processing capabilities of BigQuery. Let’s understand some real-time use cases for migrating salesforce to bigquery.

• Retail: Retail businesses can integrate CRM data with non-CRM data such as real-time online activity and social media sentiment in BigQuery to help you understand the complete customer journey and subsequently when you implement customized AI models to forecast customer tendency. The outcome involves delivering highly personalized recommendations to customers through optimal channels like email, mobile apps, or social media.
• Healthcare Organizations: CRM data, including appointment history and patient feedback, can be integrated with non-CRM data, such as patient demographics and medical history in BigQuery. The outcome is the prediction of patients who are susceptible to readmission, allowing for the creation of personalized care plans. This proactive approach enhances medical outcomes through preemptive medical care.
• Financial institutions: Financial institutions have the capability to integrate CRM data encompassing a customer’s transaction history, credit score, and financial goals with non-CRM data such as market analysis and economic trends. By utilizing BigQuery, these institutions can forecast customers’ spending patterns, investment preferences, and financial goals. This valuable insight informs the provision of personalized banking services and offers tailored to individual customer needs.

Read More About: Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Bigquery

To visually learn about this migration, check out our YouTube video:

Conclusion

The blog talks about the two methods you can use to move data from Salesforce to BigQuery in a seamless fashion. The idea of custom coding with its implicit control over the entire data-transfer process is always attractive. However, it is also a huge resource load for any organization.

A practical alternative is Hevo – a fault-tolerant, reliable Data Integration Platform. Hevo gives you an environment free from any hassles, where you can securely move data from any source to any destination.

See how easy it is to migrate data from Salesforce to BigQuery and that too for free.

Sign up for a 14-day free trial and experience the feature-rich Hevo suite first hand. You can also have a look at the unbeatable pricing that will help you choose the right plan for your business needs.

Frequently Asked Questions