Thinking of Salesforce Data Archival Leveraging the Heroku Platform? Let’s Simplify it For You

Since data is the crux of any business, it grows in tandem with the business itself. Say, your enterprise has been in business for more than a decade & you happen to use the Salesforce cloud platform to manage the business model, then there is a high chance you would have encountered at least some of its limitations. This will especially be true in terms of the data storage limits as Salesforce offers limited data storage which most businesses start to exhaust after a few years.

So, what’s the solution to it you ask? Well, you could always purge some business data from the storage, either manually or using the tools offered by Salesforce. But if deleting data is not feasible (which mostly isn’t), you can always turn to your trusted old friend, data archiving. Yes, by archiving data from the SaaS platform into a secure & reliable secondary storage, you can avoid hitting your data storage limits in Salesforce.

Now, even though the Heroku platform (a subsidiary of Salesforce) is integrated with the CRM giant to provide a sophisticated custom user interface that can be developed using different programming languages, it also supports seamless replication of data from Salesforce using the Heroku Postgres database. This is the primary reason why most enterprises turn to the Heroku platform when it comes to archiving their data in Salesforce.

Integrating the Salesforce System with Heroku

When it comes to integrating Salesforce with Heroku, there are many methods to achieve this integration. These include using Salesforce Connect, Salesforce Rest APIs, Canvas Callouts, & more, but the most widely-known method happens to be using Heroku Connect. Heroku Connect is a simple add-on data integration service available with the Heroku platform that makes it easy for users to build Heroku apps that share data with their Salesforce deployment.

In simpler terms, using Heroku Connect, enterprises can synchronize their business data into the Heroku Postgres database (another add-on SQL database service that runs on Heroku) using point-n-click tools, not code. By setting up a bi-directional synchronization between Salesforce & Heroku Postgres, Heroku Connect unifies the contacts, accounts, & other custom objects in the Salesforce database with data in the Postgres database.

Archiving Data using Heroku

Heroku Connect has plenty of benefits in terms of ease of use, point & click configuration, & easy installation but it has some major drawbacks as well.

• Firstly, Heroku Connect simply establishes a connection between the systems (Salesforce & Heroku Postgres) but does not provide any archiving tool. This forces the users to create their own custom-designed archiving engine that will handle the archiving job, but even this is no easy task. Not only will they have to take into account the complex object relationships while creating the custom solution, but they also have to ensure that no data loss happens while archiving.
• Not only this, even the view mechanism (allows archived data to be viewed as live data in Salesforce) & the restore mechanism (bringing archived data back into Salesforce live instance) keeping in mind the object hierarchy will have to be custom-designed; which is again a tedious process.

Also Read: How is DataArchiva different from Heroku Connect?

• When synchronizing data into Postgres, there have been instances where Heroku Connect is known to have created its own schema instead of using the enterprise’s existing schema. This makes it difficult for users to fully use the schema & forces them to create additional connections to point to the schema HC created in able to access the records.
• Lastly, Heroku Connect is an expensive investment in itself & if the users choose to design their archiving, viewing, & restoring mechanisms (again an additional cost), the overall price of Heroku Connect increases further. Also, maintaining the custom application, keeping in mind the frequent & ever-changing Salesforce releases, will again prove to be tedious & costly.

Simplifying Salesforce-Heroku Integration with DataArchiva

A more realistic approach to integrating the Salesforce system with the Heroku platform will be using a third-party data archiving application, like DataArchiva. The solution is specially created for the Salesforce system & enables users to archive their legacy data from the data storage into their preferred external database by leveraging the Heroku cloud platform. These include databases like Postgres, MSSQL, Redshift, MySQL, Oracle, etc.

Most of the limitations of Heroku Connect can be easily overcome through the use of DataArchiva. For instance, the primary drawback of Heroku Connect not having data archiving as its standard feature can easily be resolved as DataArchiva is first & foremost a data archiving application with a powerful, in-built archiving engine. When using DataArchiva, users don’t need to create any additional functionality to archive, view, & restore their data.

Also Read: Achieve Salesforce Data Archiving to Heroku using DataArchiva: 12 EASY STEPs

Moreover, while archiving, DataArchiva exactly replicates the enterprise’s object relationships & organizational schema from Salesforce into the external storage instead of creating its own. This keeps the archived data always accessible while maintaining 100% data integrity. Additionally, DataArchiva brings together both live & archived data to feed it to the BI tools (Tableau, Power BI, etc) the enterprise might be using to generate insightful reports.

What’s more, users can enjoy high-speed data processing speeds (1M records in just 100 mins) with DataArchiva & that too without using any additional integration tool. Since DataArchiva facilitates seamless data archival, it ultimately contributes to long-term data retention that actually makes adhering to regulatory compliance guidelines much easier. And users get all this for a fraction of the cost they would spend while using Heroku Connect.

If you want to know more about DataArchiva’s role in integrating Salesforce with Heroku for data archival, check out this product datasheet or feel free to reach out to our experts.