Connect to Salesforce Marketing Data in RapidMiner

This article shows how you can easily integrate the CData JDBC driver for Salesforce Marketing into your processes in RapidMiner. This article uses the CData JDBC Driver for Salesforce Marketing to transfer Salesforce Marketing data to a process in RapidMiner.

Connect to Salesforce Marketing in RapidMiner as a JDBC Data Source

You can follow the procedure below to establish a JDBC connection to Salesforce Marketing:

1. Add a new database driver for Salesforce Marketing: Click Connections -> Manage Database Drivers.
2. In the resulting wizard, click the Add button and enter a name for the connection.
3. Enter the prefix for the JDBC URL: jdbc:sfmarketingcloud:
4. Enter the path to the cdata.jdbc.sfmarketingcloud.jar file, located in the lib subfolder of the installation directory.
5. Enter the driver class: cdata.jdbc.sfmarketingcloud.SFMarketingCloudDriver
6. Create a new Salesforce Marketing connection: Click Connections -> Manage Database Connections.
7. Enter a name for your connection.
8. For Database System, select the Salesforce Marketing driver you configured previously.
9. Enter your connection string in the Host box.

   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.

   java -jar cdata.jdbc.sfmarketingcloud.jar

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

   A typical connection string is below:

   User=myUser;Password=myPassword;InitiateOAuth=GETANDREFRESH
10. Enter your username and password if necessary.

You can now use your Salesforce Marketing connection with the various RapidMiner operators in your process. To retrieve Salesforce Marketing data, drag the Retrieve operator from the Operators view. With the Retrieve operator selected, you can then define which table to retrieve in the Parameters view by clicking the folder icon next to the "repository entry." In the resulting Repository Browser, you can expand your connection node to select the desired example set.

Finally, wire the output to the Retrieve process to a result, and run the process to see the Salesforce Marketing data.