Source Salesforce organization

Datastream supports replicating change events from a Salesforce instance, often referred to as a Salesforce organization, or a Salesforce org. Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM platform, and you can replicate data from it just as you would from other sources that Datastream supports.

This page contains information about:

  • The key terms that you need to understand when replicating from Salesforce.
  • The behavior of how Datastream handles data that's being pulled from a source Salesforce org.
  • The versions and editions of Salesforce that Datastream supports.
  • Known limitations for using Salesforce as a source.

Key terms

Salesforce operates using objects, records and fields:

  • An object is a class entity, and is similar to a table in relational databases nomenclature. Objects can be standard or custom. Standard objects are included in Salesforce by default, while custom objects are created by users to store data specific to their use-cases.
  • A record is a specific instance of an object, similar to a row in relational databases.
  • A field is a specific attribute of an object, similar to a column in relational databases.

Behavior

The Salesforce source support in Datastream relies upon the REST and Bulk 2.0 APIs. Salesforce polls for source changes based on the interval that you set to allow control over the API usage.

When replicating data from a Salesforce source, the following behavior is observed:

  • Replicateable and queryable standard objects which either have the SystemModstamp field or the LastModifiedDate can be replicated.
  • Custom objects can be replicated.
  • If configured, all historical data is replicated for included objects.
  • All changes, such as inserts, updates, and deletes from the specified objects are replicated.

Versions

Datastream supports the following Salesforce editions:

  • Pro Suite
  • Developer
  • Professional
  • Enterprise
  • Unlimited

Datastream uses the Salesforce API version 61.0.

For more information about available Salesforce editions, see the Salesforce documentation.

Known limitations

Known limitations for using Salesforce as a source include:

  • Calculated fields (also known as formulas) aren't supported.
  • The only replication method available is by periodically polling the Salesforce API (no streaming option). This means that there's impact on the API usage and freshness of the data.
  • Only queryable and replicateable objects are supported.
  • Compound fields are replicated as flattened fields.
  • Up to 600,000 deletes per minute are supported (Salesforce limitation).
  • Streams are limited to 3000 objects.
  • Stream recovery isn't supported.
  • The latestDateCovered value returned by the getUpdated() and getDeleted() API calls that Salesforce uses for data replication isn't updated on a regular basis. This might increase the values presented by the Data freshness graph in Datastream, because there might be ongoing uncommitted changes. However, the stream continues to run with no issues, and the freshness metric returns to normal when the latestDateCovered value is updated by Salesforce. For more information, see the Salesforce documentation.

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