Loading Salesforce Data to Google Cloud in Python with dlt

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This documentation provides a guide on how to use the open-source Python library, dlt, to load data from Salesforce, a cloud platform that enhances business operations and customer relationship management, to Google Cloud Storage, a data storage service on the Google Cloud Platform. Salesforce streamlines various business aspects, including sales, marketing, and customer service. On the other hand, Google Cloud Storage allows for the creation of data lakes and supports data upload in JSONL, Parquet, or CSV formats. The dlt library facilitates this data transfer process. For more information about Salesforce, visit https://www.salesforce.com/.

dlt Key Features

• Salesforce: A verified source in dlt that loads data using Salesforce API to the destination of your choice. It supports multiple resources like User, UserRole, Lead, Contact, Campaign, and many more. Read more about it here.
• Governance Support in dlt Pipelines: dlt pipelines offer robust governance support through pipeline metadata utilization, schema enforcement and curation, and schema change alerts. This contributes to better data management practices, compliance adherence, and overall data governance. Read more about it here.
• Google Storage: dlt supports Google Storage as a destination for data. It requires the installation of dlt[gs] which will install gcfs package. It also supports Azure Blob Storage and Local file system. Read more about it here.
• Filesystem & buckets: Filesystem destination in dlt stores data in remote file systems and bucket storages like S3, Google Storage or Azure Blob Storage. It can be used as a staging for other destinations or to quickly build a data lake. Read more about it here.
• Staging support: dlt supports Snowflake with S3 and Google Cloud Storage as staging destinations. It uploads files in the parquet format to the bucket provider and asks Snowflake to copy their data directly into the database. Read more about it here.

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 Google Cloud Storage:

pip install "dlt[filesystem]"

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 Google Cloud Storage. You can run the following commands to create a starting point for loading data from Salesforce to Google Cloud Storage:

# create a new directory
mkdir salesforce_pipeline
cd salesforce_pipeline
# initialize a new pipeline with your source and destination
dlt init salesforce filesystem
# 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[filesystem]>=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.filesystem]
dataset_name = "dataset_name" # please set me up!
bucket_url = "bucket_url" # please set me up!

[destination.filesystem.credentials]
aws_access_key_id = "aws_access_key_id" # please set me up!
aws_secret_access_key = "aws_secret_access_key" # please set me up!

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 Google Cloud Storage destination in our docs.

The default filesystem destination is configured to connect to AWS S3. To load to Google Cloud Storage, update the [destination.filesystem.credentials] section in your secrets.toml.

[destination.filesystem.credentials]
client_email="Please set me up!"
private_key="Please set me up!"
project_id="Please set me up!"

By default, the filesystem destination will store your files as JSONL. You can tell your pipeline to choose a different format with the loader_file_format property that you can set directly on the pipeline or via your config.toml. Available values are jsonl, parquet and csv:

[pipeline] # in ./dlt/config.toml
loader_file_format="parquet"

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='filesystem', 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 Google Cloud Storage 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: Learn how to deploy your dlt pipeline using GitHub Actions for CI/CD. Github Actions
• Deploy with Airflow: Follow this guide to deploy your dlt pipeline using Airflow and Google Composer. Airflow
• Deploy with Google Cloud Functions: Explore how to deploy your dlt pipeline using Google Cloud Functions. Google cloud functions
• More Deployment Options: Discover other methods to deploy your dlt pipeline. and others...

The running in production section will teach you about:

• How to Monitor your pipeline: Learn how to effectively monitor your dlt pipelines in production to ensure they run smoothly and detect issues early. How to Monitor your pipeline
• Set up alerts: Configure alerts to get notified about important events and potential issues in your dlt pipelines, allowing for timely intervention. Set up alerts
• And set up tracing: Implement tracing to gain insights into the performance and execution details of your dlt pipelines, helping to troubleshoot and optimize them. 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

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