Amazon QuickSight allows users to build interactive dashboards in the cloud. When paired with CData Connect AI, you get cloud-to-cloud access to Salesforce data for visualizations, dashboards, and more. This article shows how to connect to Salesforce in Connect AI and build dashboards in Amazon QuickSight with access to Salesforce data.
CData Connect AI provides a pure cloud-to-cloud interface for Salesforce, allowing you to allowing build visualizations from Salesforce data in Amazon QuickSight. By importing your Salesforce data into the Amazon QuickSight "Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine" (SPICE), you can leverage the powerful data processing features of the Amazon ecosystem to build responsive dashboards. And with the ability to schedule refreshes of the data stored in SPICE, you control how up-to-date your dashboards are.
About Salesforce Data Integration
Accessing and integrating live data from Salesforce has never been easier with CData. Customers rely on CData connectivity to:
- Access to custom entities and fields means Salesforce users get access to all of Salesforce.
- Create atomic and batch update operations.
- Read, write, update, and delete their Salesforce data.
- Leverage the latest Salesforce features and functionalities with support for SOAP API versions 30.0.
- See improved performance based on SOQL support to push complex queries down to Salesforce servers.
- Use SQL stored procedures to perform actions like creating, retrieving, aborting, and deleting jobs, uploading and downloading attachments and documents, and more.
Users frequently integrate Salesforce data with:
- other ERPs, marketing automation, HCMs, and more.
- preferred data tools like Power BI, Tableau, Looker, and more.
- databases and data warehouses.
For more information on how CData solutions work with Salesforce, check out our Salesforce integration page.
Getting Started
Configure Salesforce Connectivity for Amazon QuickSight
Connectivity to Salesforce from Amazon QuickSight is made possible through CData Connect AI. To work with Salesforce data from Amazon QuickSight, we start by creating and configuring a Salesforce connection.
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Log into Connect AI, click Sources, and then click Add Connection
👁 Adding a Connection
- Select "Salesforce" from the Add Connection panel
👁 Selecting a data source
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Salesforce uses OAuth to authenticate. Click "Sign in" to authenticate with Salesforce.
👁 Authenticating with OAuth (Salesforce is shown).
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Navigate to the Permissions tab in the Add Salesforce Connection page and update the User-based permissions.
👁 Updating permissions
Add a Personal Access Token
When connecting to Connect AI through the REST API, the OData API, or the Virtual SQL Server, a Personal Access Token (PAT) is used to authenticate the connection to Connect AI. It is best practice to create a separate PAT for each service to maintain granularity of access.
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Click on the Gear icon () at the top right of the Connect AI app to open the settings page.
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On the Settings page, go to the Access Tokens section and click Create PAT.
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Give the PAT a name and click Create.
👁 Creating a new PAT
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The personal access token is only visible at creation, so be sure to copy it and store it securely for future use.
With the connection configured and a PAT generated, you are ready to connect to Salesforce data from Amazon QuickSight.
Import Salesforce Data into SPICE and Create Interactive Dashboards
The steps below outline creating a new data set based on the connection to Salesforce in Connect AI, importing the dataset into SPICE, and building a simple visualization from the data.
- Log into Amazon QuickSight and click "Manage data."
- Click "Now data set," select SQL Server as the data source, configure the connection to your Connect AI instance, and click "Create data source."
👁 Connecting to Connect AI as a QuickSight data set.
- Select a table to visualize (or subait a custom SQL query for your data).
👁 Selecting a Table to visualize.
- Click "Edit/Preview data" to customize the data set.
- Select "Import to SPICE for quicker analytics" and click "Visualize."
👁 Importing data to SPICE for quicker analytics.
- Select fields to visualize and a visual type.
👁 Visualizing data in QuickSight via Connect AI (Salesforce is shown).
Schedule Refreshes for SPICE Data Sets
QuickSight users can schedule refreshes for data sets that are imported into SPICE, ensuring that data being analyzed is only as old as the most recent refresh.
- Navigate to the QuickSight home page.
- Click "Manage data."
- Select the data set you wish to refresh.
- Click "Schedule refresh."
- Click Create, configure the refresh settings (time zone, repeat frequency, and starting datetime), and click Create.
👁 Scheduling a refreshing of the data imported into SPICE.
Live Access to Salesforce Data from Cloud Applications
At this point, you have a direct, cloud-to-cloud connection to Salesforce data from your Amazon QuickSight dashboard. You can create new visualizations, build interactive dashboards, and more. For more information on gaining live access to data from more than 100 SaaS, Big Data, and NoSQL sources from cloud applications like Amazon QuickSight, refer to our Connect AI page.
