Connecting to Salesforce

Salesforce.com is a cloud Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. You can use the Salesforce data connector to import your organization's Salesforce data.

Before you start

Salesforce credentials

To connect to Salesforce, you must gather the following:

• Salesforce username
• Salesforce password
• Security token

  Note

  Some connections require a security token, while others do not. You only require a security token if your connection fails without it.

For help gathering the connection prerequisites, contact the Salesforce administrator in your organization. If your administrator cannot help you, you or your administrator should contact Salesforce Support.

Salesforce API and editions

The connector uses the Salesforce API to access data, therefore you or your Salesforce administrator must enable API access for your company and user account in Salesforce before you connect. You must also have one of the following Salesforce editions:

• Developer Edition
• Professional Edition
• Enterprise Edition
• Unlimited Edition

Create a Salesforce connection

1. From the Analytics main menu, select Import > Database and application.
2. From the New Connections tab, in the ACL Connectors section, select Salesforce.

   Tip

   You can filter the list of available connectors by entering a search string in the Filter connections box. Connectors are listed alphabetically.

3. In the Data Connection Settings panel, enter the connection settings and at the bottom of the panel, click Save and Connect.

   You can accept the default Connection Name, or enter a new one.

The connection for Salesforce is saved to the Existing Connections tab. In the future, you can reconnect to Salesforce from the saved connection.

Once the connection is established, the Data Access window opens to the Staging Area and you can begin importing data. For help importing data from Salesforce, see Working with the Data Access window.

Connection settings

Basic settings

Setting	Description	Example
User	The user name of the Salesforce account to authenticate to the server.
Password	The password of the Salesforce account used to authenticate to the Salesforce server.
Security Token	The security token to authenticate access to the Salesforce account. A security token can be obtained by going to your profile information and resetting the security token. If your password is reset, you will also need to reset the security token.
Proxy Server	The hostname or IP address of a proxy to route HTTP traffic through. The driver can use the HTTP, Windows (NTLM), or Kerberos authentication types to authenticate to an HTTP proxy.
Proxy Port	The port the HTTP proxy is running on that you want to redirect HTTP traffic through.	80
Proxy User	The user name to be used to authenticate to the ProxyServer proxy.
Proxy Password	The password to authenticate the Proxy User to the ProxyServer proxy.

Advanced settings

Setting	Description	Example
Enable connection to sandbox URL	To specify if the connection should be made to a Salesforce sandbox account.	false
Sandbox URL
SSL Server Certificate	The certificate to be accepted from the server when connecting using TLS/SSL. You can provide any of the following: a full PEM certificate path to a local file containing the certificate public key MD5 or SHA1 thumbprint (hex values can also be either space or colon separated) Any other certificate that is not trusted by the machine is rejected.
Map To WVarchar	To specify whether string types map to SQL_WVARCHAR instead of SQL_VARCHAR. It is set by default. String columns must be mapped to SQL_WVARCHAR to accommodate various international character sets, so MapToWVarchar is set to true by default. You may set it to false to use SQL_VARCHAR instead.	true