Analyze Salesforce Marketing Data in R

Access Salesforce Marketing data with pure R script and standard SQL on any machine where R and Java can be installed. You can use the CData JDBC Driver for Salesforce Marketing and the RJDBC package to work with remote Salesforce Marketing data in R. By using the CData Driver, you are leveraging a driver written for industry-proven standards to access your data in the popular, open-source R language. This article shows how to use the driver to execute SQL queries to Salesforce Marketing and visualize Salesforce Marketing data by calling standard R functions.

Install R

You can match the driver's performance gains from multi-threading and managed code by running the multithreaded Microsoft R Open or by running open R linked with the BLAS/LAPACK libraries. This article uses Microsoft R Open 3.2.3, which is preconfigured to install packages from the Jan. 1, 2016 snapshot of the CRAN repository. This snapshot ensures reproducibility.

Load the RJDBC Package

To use the driver, download the RJDBC package. After installing the RJDBC package, the following line loads the package:

Connect to Salesforce Marketing as a JDBC Data Source

You will need the following information to connect to Salesforce Marketing as a JDBC data source:

• Driver Class: Set this to cdata.jdbc.sfmarketingcloud.SFMarketingCloudDriver
• Classpath: Set this to the location of the driver JAR. By default this is the lib subfolder of the installation folder.

The DBI functions, such as dbConnect and dbSendQuery, provide a unified interface for writing data access code in R. Use the following line to initialize a DBI driver that can make JDBC requests to the CData JDBC Driver for Salesforce Marketing:

You can now use DBI functions to connect to Salesforce Marketing and execute SQL queries. Initialize the JDBC connection with the dbConnect function.

Authenticating to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud APIs

Set the User and Password to your login credentials, or to the credentials for a sandbox user if you are connecting to a sandbox account.

Connecting to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud APIs

By default, the data provider connects to production environments. Set UseSandbox to true to use a Salesforce Marketing Cloud sandbox account.

The default Instance is s7 of the Web Services API; however, if you use a different instance, you can set Instance.

Built-in Connection String Designer

For assistance in constructing the JDBC URL, use the connection string designer built into the Salesforce Marketing JDBC Driver. Either double-click the JAR file or execute the jar file from the command-line.

Fill in the connection properties and copy the connection string to the clipboard.

Below is a sample dbConnect call, including a typical JDBC connection string:

Schema Discovery

The driver models Salesforce Marketing APIs as relational tables, views, and stored procedures. Use the following line to retrieve the list of tables:

Execute SQL Queries

You can use the dbGetQuery function to execute any SQL query supported by the Salesforce Marketing API:

You can view the results in a data viewer window with the following command:

Plot Salesforce Marketing Data

You can now analyze Salesforce Marketing data with any of the data visualization packages available in the CRAN repository. You can create simple bar plots with the built-in bar plot function: