Data Cloud: Full Stream Ahead

Most admins don’t have the luxury of managing only a single Salesforce instance. Frequently, data is strewn across multiple orgs and can be difficult to integrate. That’s where Data Cloud comes in, providing the ability to create a single source of truth across Salesforce orgs.

Even if you are the lucky admin with a single org, pulling your data into Data Cloud helps you create new insights into your data and helps harmonize and streamline it. Because of this, one of the first things customers want to do when they set up Data Cloud is bring over all their data from core. The CRM connector that does this is one of the most popular connectors at Salesforce for a reason!

We’re here to show you how to make the best of it and how the power of streaming will make it easier than ever.

Your core data in Data Cloud

Data Cloud unlocks a number of key use cases that admins can benefit from. To name a few:

• Use segmentation to divide your data into logical segments that represent a subset of customers; for example, customers who have visited your store in the last year.
• Reach out to customers via activation channels (email or text).
• Perform complex transformations on your data via transforms. For example, you can prep your data so it’s ready to use downstream via transformations like removing null columns or converting all characters to lowercase.
• And, of course, you can visualize all your data via Tableau.

Full stream ahead!

As of this writing, we bring data from core into Data Cloud at two refresh intervals.

• Incrementally (every ~10 minutes or so): When we update records that have changed
• Bi-weekly: When we do a full refresh of all data from core in Data Cloud

However, we’re always trying to make things faster, so we’re introducing a new mode by which data will be updated in the CRM connector — by utilizing streaming. Streaming is a well-known concept in the data world. It’s a fancy way of saying anytime there’s a change in your core Salesforce org, we’ll capture that change and reflect it in Data Cloud. This isn’t a new concept to Salesforce — we already have streaming capabilities with Change Data Capture.

Underneath the hood, we leverage these exact same capabilities to capture changes in core directly into Data Cloud without you having to do anything!

Creating new data streams

Go ahead and create data streams as you normally do.

All new data streams will stream by default going forward, assuming:

• The object in the data stream is one that is CDC enabled.
• The set of fields being brought back in the data stream doesn’t have formula fields.
• The org in the data stream isn’t part of a filter pilot.

Existing data streams will be moved from batch to streaming (assuming eligibility) when we run our bi-weekly full data refresh check.

So, long story short, go about creating data streams as you normally do and you’ll auto-magically see the streaming tag when you’re about to deploy.

We’re super excited that you continue to use Data Cloud and can’t wait to see what you build now that your data will show up in Data Cloud even faster.

Full stream ahead!

Thanks to Ashok Shivarudraiah (Sr. Director, Engineering) for his review and inputs.

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Data Stream Schedule in Data Cloud
• Salesforce Admins Blog: 5 Tips for Getting Started with Data Cloud
• Salesforce Admins Podcast: Data Cloud Enhancements That Admins Will Love