The little tool that turn Salesforce into a relational database
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
DBAmp allows easy access to Salesforce CRM data through Linked Servers in SQL Server. DBAmp has built-in procedures that allow you to take and refresh snapshots of your data into a SQL database. We used SQL to build out our segmentation logic and used DBAmp to bring in the raw data for those calculations. We then used DBAmp to write the data back into Salesforce CRM on a nightly basis. We also used the data to build out our constituent data warehouse.
Pros
- Connects & Links to Salesforce CRM databases - including custom objects.
- Built in procedures to create copies of the database on SQL Server.
- Built in procedures to Add, Update, and Delete data within Salesforce CRM.
- Great Technical Support.
Cons
- Because it uses Linked Servers, not sure how this will work in Azure SQL.
- Replicated tables are based on user security - this means you have to pay for a license to set this up.
- There is no built-in function to skip tables or fields on secured tables. This has to be done on the CRM side for fields and we built a function to skip tables in the replication logic.
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited as an inexpensive tool as "middleware" between your on-prem or hosted SQL Server. Not sure how well it will translate to cloud-based SQL as a platform (Azure SQL) as it relies on linked servers. This tool only applies to Salesforce CRM - not Marketing Cloud. For writing back to Salesforce we did run into Salesforce resource limitations when extensive triggers existed on the objects.