Loading Salesforce Data to EDB BigAnimal with dlt in Python

tip

We will be using the dlt PostgreSQL destination to connect to EDB BigAnimal. You can get the connection string for your EDB BigAnimal database as described in the EDB BigAnimal Docs.

Need help deploying these pipelines, or figuring out how to run them in your data stack?

Join our Slack community or book a call with our support engineer Violetta.

Salesforce is a cloud platform that streamlines business operations and customer relationship management, encompassing sales, marketing, and customer service. EDB BigAnimal is a fully managed database-as-a-service that runs in your cloud account or BigAnimal's cloud account, operated by one of the builders of Postgres. It simplifies the setup, management, and scaling of databases. You can use PostgreSQL or EDB Postgres Advanced Server with Oracle compatibility, or choose distributed high-availability cluster types for geographically distributed databases. This documentation explains how to load data from Salesforce to EDB BigAnimal using the open-source python library called dlt. Further information about Salesforce can be found here.

dlt Key Features

• Pipeline Metadata: dlt pipelines leverage metadata to provide governance capabilities, including load IDs for tracking data loads and facilitating data lineage and traceability. Learn more
• Schema Enforcement and Curation: dlt empowers users to enforce and curate schemas, ensuring data consistency and quality by defining the structure of normalized data. Read more
• Scalability via Iterators, Chunking, and Parallelization: dlt offers scalable data extraction by leveraging iterators, chunking, and parallelization techniques for efficient processing of large datasets. Explore scalability
• Implicit Extraction DAGs: dlt automatically generates an extraction DAG based on the dependencies between data sources and their transformations, ensuring data consistency and integrity. Understand DAGs
• Incremental Loading: dlt supports incremental loading, allowing you to append, replace, and merge your tables efficiently, and set up "last value" incremental loading. Learn about incremental loading

Getting started with your pipeline locally

0. Prerequisites

dlt requires Python 3.8 or higher. Additionally, you need to have the pip package manager installed, and we recommend using a virtual environment to manage your dependencies. You can learn more about preparing your computer for dlt in our installation reference.

1. Install dlt

First you need to install the dlt library with the correct extras for EDB BigAnimal:

pip install "dlt[postgres]"

The dlt cli has a useful command to get you started with any combination of source and destination. For this example, we want to load data from Salesforce to EDB BigAnimal. You can run the following commands to create a starting point for loading data from Salesforce to EDB BigAnimal:

# create a new directory
mkdir salesforce_pipeline
cd salesforce_pipeline
# initialize a new pipeline with your source and destination
dlt init salesforce postgres
# install the required dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt

The last command will install the required dependencies for your pipeline. The dependencies are listed in the requirements.txt:

simple-salesforce>=1.12.4
dlt[postgres]>=0.3.5

You now have the following folder structure in your project:

salesforce_pipeline/
├── .dlt/
│   ├── config.toml          # configs for your pipeline
│   └── secrets.toml         # secrets for your pipeline
├── salesforce/                   # folder with source specific files
│   └── ...
├── salesforce_pipeline.py        # your main pipeline script
├── requirements.txt         # dependencies for your pipeline
└── .gitignore               # ignore files for git (not required)

2. Configuring your source and destination credentials

The dlt cli will have created a .dlt directory in your project folder. This directory contains a config.toml file and a secrets.toml file that you can use to configure your pipeline. The automatically created version of these files look like this:

generated config.toml

# put your configuration values here

[runtime]
log_level="WARNING"  # the system log level of dlt
# use the dlthub_telemetry setting to enable/disable anonymous usage data reporting, see https://dlthub.com/docs/telemetry
dlthub_telemetry = true

generated secrets.toml

# put your secret values and credentials here. do not share this file and do not push it to github

[sources.salesforce]
user_name = "user_name" # please set me up!
password = "password" # please set me up!
security_token = "security_token" # please set me up!

[destination.postgres]
dataset_name = "dataset_name" # please set me up!

[destination.postgres.credentials]
database = "database" # please set me up!
password = "password" # please set me up!
username = "username" # please set me up!
host = "host" # please set me up!
port = 5432
connect_timeout = 15

2.1. Adjust the generated code to your usecase

Further help setting up your source and destinations

• Read more about setting up the Salesforce source in our docs.
• Read more about setting up the EDB BigAnimal destination in our docs.

3. Running your pipeline for the first time

The dlt cli has also created a main pipeline script for you at salesforce_pipeline.py, as well as a folder salesforce that contains additional python files for your source. These files are your local copies which you can modify to fit your needs. In some cases you may find that you only need to do small changes to your pipelines or add some configurations, in other cases these files can serve as a working starting point for your code, but will need to be adjusted to do what you need them to do.

The main pipeline script will look something like this:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
"""Pipeline to load Salesforce data."""
import dlt
from salesforce import salesforce_source


def load() -> None:
    """Execute a pipeline from Salesforce."""

    pipeline = dlt.pipeline(
        pipeline_name="salesforce", destination='postgres', dataset_name="salesforce_data"
    )
    # Execute the pipeline
    load_info = pipeline.run(salesforce_source())

    # Print the load info
    print(load_info)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    load()

Provided you have set up your credentials, you can run your pipeline like a regular python script with the following command:

python salesforce_pipeline.py

4. Inspecting your load result

You can now inspect the state of your pipeline with the dlt cli:

dlt pipeline salesforce info

You can also use streamlit to inspect the contents of your EDB BigAnimal destination for this:

# install streamlit
pip install streamlit
# run the streamlit app for your pipeline with the dlt cli:
dlt pipeline salesforce show

5. Next steps to get your pipeline running in production

One of the beauties of dlt is, that we are just a plain Python library, so you can run your pipeline in any environment that supports Python >= 3.8. We have a couple of helpers and guides in our docs to get you there:

The Deploy section will show you how to deploy your pipeline to

• Deploy with GitHub Actions: Automate your pipeline deployment using GitHub Actions. Learn more
• Deploy with Airflow and Google Composer: Utilize Airflow and Google Composer for managing and scheduling your pipeline. Learn more
• Deploy with Google Cloud Functions: Leverage Google Cloud Functions for serverless deployment of your pipeline. Learn more
• Explore other deployment options: Discover various methods to deploy your dlt pipeline. Learn more

The running in production section will teach you about:

• How to Monitor your pipeline: Learn how to effectively monitor your dlt pipeline to ensure it runs smoothly in production. How to Monitor your pipeline
• Set up alerts: Set up alerts to get notified about any issues or important events in your dlt pipeline. Set up alerts
• Set up tracing: Implement tracing to gain detailed insights into the execution of your dlt pipeline. And set up tracing

Available Sources and Resources

For this verified source the following sources and resources are available

Source salesforce

"Salesforce source provides comprehensive business data, covering customer details, sales opportunities, product pricing, and marketing campaigns."

Resource Name	Write Disposition	Description
account	merge	Represents an individual or organization that interacts with your business
campaign	replace	Represents a marketing initiative or project designed to achieve specific goals
contact	replace	Represents an individual person associated with an account or organization
lead	replace	Represents a prospective customer/individual/org. that has shown interest in a company's products/services
opportunity	merge	Represents a sales opportunity for a specific account or contact
pricebook_2	replace	Used to manage product pricing and create price books
pricebook_entry	replace	Represents a specific price for a product in a price book
product_2	replace	Used for managing and organizing your product-related data within the Salesforce ecosystem
sf_user	replace	Represents an individual who has access to a Salesforce org or instance
user_role	replace	Represents a role within the organization's hierarchy

Additional pipeline guides

• Load data from IBM Db2 to PostgreSQL in python with dlt
• Load data from HubSpot to DuckDB in python with dlt
• Load data from Chess.com to ClickHouse in python with dlt
• Load data from Zendesk to Neon Serverless Postgres in python with dlt
• Load data from Pipedrive to PostgreSQL in python with dlt
• Load data from HubSpot to EDB BigAnimal in python with dlt
• Load data from The Local Filesystem to Neon Serverless Postgres in python with dlt
• Load data from Chess.com to DuckDB in python with dlt
• Load data from Notion to EDB BigAnimal in python with dlt
• Load data from Airtable to Azure Cosmos DB in python with dlt