Salesforce was not built to be your data warehouse. That’s where Snowflake comes in. The modern digital ecosystem creates endless data points and they all need a home. What we care about today may change tomorrow. What we care about tomorrow may need to look at yesterday to make informed decisions. Nobody likes a hoarder unless you’re a data analyst hoarding data to understand what influences purchasing decisions for your company’s largest customers.
Snowflake is really good at hoarding data and that’s a very good thing. It’s elastic, secure, performant, and highly available. Built with scale in mind, Snowflake makes the perfect storage facility for all your information. Data that is casually collected or profoundly insightful can be indiscriminately stored in Snowflake. Business intelligence and automation tools can be layered on top and embedded or piped back into Salesforce or your other enterprise SaaS applications.
How do companies use Snowflake and Salesforce together?
To highlight a few common use cases we’ve come across in our client base:
Let’s say you are an account manager or business development executive getting ready to call your biggest client. Sure, you want to see a high-level snapshot of their accounts, subscriptions, balances, and profitability. But what if you can also get insights into their latest Platform activity on your company’s mobile app?
What if we could use the data we capture in Salesforce, such as call notes and your email activity, to derive insights that customize the Platform experience? That would be some powerful stuff, but how would you begin to get all of that data into Snowflake?
Integrating Snowflake and Salesforce
Our preferred method for replicating Salesforce schema and data to data warehousing is leveraging a tool called Fivetran. If you want to get down to business, Fivetran comes with pre-built connectors for the most popular web applications and support for Snowflake and most other hosted data warehouses.
Leveraging Snowflake to turn Salesforce into a true data-driven business application can take on several forms.
If you need to be able to view your data warehouse table rows as related records on a Salesforce page, Lightning Connect and external objects will do the trick. You can take your transactional records and surface them to the user on-demand and in real-time.
Bonus: Visualizing This Data with BI
Tableau isn’t just for business intelligence anymore. Of course, you can sit your favorite BI tool on top of Snowflake to derive insights, but Tableau brings with it a special set of tools. With the acquisition of Tableau, Salesforce has married it with Einstein Analytics (Tableau CRM) to allow for dynamic, embedded dashboards and alerts. Tableau Dashboards come alive with predictions, explanations, and suggestions directly from Einstein.
