Developing a Salesforce Download

About three years ago I was working on a Salesforce implementation for a campaigning charity. My role was to develop a SQL Server Operational Data Store that mirrored the data in their Salesforce instance. After considering a number of options we decided to develop our own download interface to regularly refresh the SQL Server database from Salesforce. Initially this was developed using Talend as the middleware, which worked pretty well for daily incremental downloads of changed Salesforce records. Continue reading “Developing a Salesforce Download”

Downloading Blackboard Data from Snowflake DB in .NET

Blackboard Data provides access to data about activity on your Blackboard LMS via the Blackboard reporting stack. The data is stored in a Snowflake data warehouse instance. Here you can query the data directly via the Snowflake console or connect a reporting tool such as tableau or Power BI. But what if you want to export the data out of snowflake, for example to an institutional data warehouse. There are number of ways to do this but .NET is my preferred platform so that is what I’ll be using. The Snowflake documentation on this makes the task look quite confusing- but actually it’s very straightforward. Here’s how to connect to and download from Snowflake to an on premise SQL Server instance. Continue reading “Downloading Blackboard Data from Snowflake DB in .NET”

Query Amazon Redshift from SQL Server

There is a connector for Amazon Redshift (a data warehouse product available on Amazon Webservices) in Power BI that works just fine including support for direct query. But what if you want to pull data from a Redshift database to SQL Server? I wanted this to add content from a third party data warehouse on AWS to an on premise institutional data warehouse. In this scenario there is an ODBC driver that you can use create a linked server to the external DB and pull the data straight out. Continue reading “Query Amazon Redshift from SQL Server”