The Salesforce SQL Server integration has always been popular among organizations. Businesses combine these tools to make accurate data analysis, perform CRM data enrichment, and fulfill other business objectives. To carry out the integration in a decent way, use the ETL solutions for that. In this article, we present the most popular data integration tools to be used for free to connect SQL Server and Salesforce together.
What is Salesforce?
Salesforce is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform. It provides all the necessary functionality for businesses, helping them to get a comprehensive overview of customers and develop personalized user experiences. Apart from being an outstanding CRM tool, Salesforce also provides additional services. The most popular among them is the artificial intelligence (AI) platform designed to improve marketing automation, HR management, sales funnel analysis, etc.
What Is an SQL Server?
Microsoft SQL Server is one of the most popular and widely used relational database management systems (RDBMS) in the world. Its popularity comes from its compatibility with Windows and Linux operating systems. Moreover, it easily integrates with other Microsoft products and applications, which makes it a good choice for many businesses.
Benefits of SQL Server Salesforce Integration
Organizations aim to bring those two services together because such integration provides a range of benefits, including:
- Automation. Data transfer from Salesforce to SQL Server or vice versa can be automated with data integration solutions. There is no need for manual data entry or spreadsheet uploading.
- Helicopter view of customers. Data integration tools make it possible to obtain a 360-degree view of a customer. For instance, you can merge the clickstream data from a website with user profiles on Salesforce. This helps to discover product preferences, purchase frequency, location, and other details, providing more information about each customer.
- Data consolidation. Companies that use MS SQL Server as the central data repository could benefit from ETL tools to set up automated data transfer from Salesforce.
- Reporting and analytics. MS SQL Server Analysis Services is an online data processing and data mining tool. People use it across organizations to analyze existing data and extract some value from it.
Free Tools for SQL Server and Salesforce Integration
There are a variety of data integration services within the current software market. They all share the same functionality for building ETL pipelines, though differ in feature sets and pricing. Here, we’d like to present some of the leading data integration tools that can be used for free. Startups could particularly benefit from these tools to integrate data from Salesforce to SQL Server and vice versa.
Skyvia Data Integration
This is a cloud solution for moving data integration between cloud applications, databases, and data warehouses. It doesn’t require any coding knowledge, as you can design all the data pipelines in Visual Wizard via the drag-and-drop interface. Data Integration product consists of the following tools:
- Import allows you to load data from SQL Server to Salesforce or in the opposite direction. Moreover, It offers mapping and transformation options, assuring the excellent quality of data.
- Export can download the existing data of Salesforce or SQL Server to a CSV file.
- Replication works in the Salesforce-to-SQL direction and developers designed it to replicate cloud data to a relational database or a data warehouse and keep it constantly updated.
- Synchronization can also be applied to the SQL Server and Salesforce integration as it bi-directionally synchronizes data between the selected sources. Note that it’s a good practice to apply this scenario only in case one of the systems is empty because it copies all data on the first run. Utilizing Salesforce Integration Services can further streamline this process, ensuring expert handling and optimization of data synchronization between systems.
- Data Flow is a complex tool designed for constructing compound data pipelines with advanced transformations. Data Flow allows you to use several destinations, so you may send your Salesforce data to SQL Server and another destination at the same time.
- Control Flow works in conjunction with Data Flow to run the integrations in a specific order or based on a certain condition.
Skyvia has a free plan with all the functionality necessary for data integration. There are some limitations on the number of scheduled integrations, data rows to transfer, etc. Once you’d like to raise the bar, you can always opt for paid plans with more options and higher limits available.
Skyvia Automation
Skyvia designed the Automation product to automate repetitive tasks. It allows you to create a workflow with the components that define the automation process. For instance, once a new customer record appears in Salesforce, it’s possible to send it instantly to SQL Server with the event-based trigger. Also, you can set up on-schedule triggers that invoke a certain action at a specific time. Skyvia Automation can also be used for free with a limit of 1000 monthly tasks. Once you want to raise the bar, there’s a paid version that developers made to meet your data load and expectations.
Salesforce Data Loader
This is a native Salesforce solution designed to import and export data to/from the CRM. All the operations within Salesforce Data Loader involve CSV files. If you import data from SQL Server, it needs to be formatted into a CSV file, which takes some time and manual effort. The same goes for the Salesforce data import to SQL Server — you’ll first need to export it into a CSV file, elaborate on it, and then load it into the RDBMS. As you see, such a process is rather complicated and tedious. However, it might be suitable for occasional integration with small datasets.
Fivetran
Fivetran is another data integration platform that you can use for data movement between SQL Server and Salesforce. This tool also offers a free plan, though the limitations on the monthly data amount are applied.
Wrapping Up
Businesses are getting more interested in moving data between Salesforce and SQL Server, as this integration opens up many opportunities for them. Better customer understanding, data consolidation, and analytics are among the most popular benefits of this integration. Skyvia and other data integration tools make the process of data extraction, transformation, and loading easy and accessible for any business.
