Analyze Salesforce Marketing Data in R



Create data visualizations and use high-performance statistical functions to analyze Salesforce Marketing data in Microsoft R Open.

Access Salesforce Marketing data with pure R script and standard SQL. You can use the CData ODBC Driver for Salesforce Marketing and the RODBC 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 data and visualize Salesforce Marketing data in R.

Install R

You can complement the driver's performance gains from multi-threading and managed code by running the multithreaded Microsoft R Open or by running R linked with the BLAS/LAPACK libraries. This article uses Microsoft R Open (MRO).

Connect to Salesforce Marketing as an ODBC Data Source

Information for connecting to Salesforce Marketing follows, along with different instructions for configuring a DSN in Windows and Linux environments.

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.

When you configure the DSN, you may also want to set the Max Rows connection property. This will limit the number of rows returned, which is especially helpful for improving performance when designing reports and visualizations.

Windows

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

Linux

If you are installing the CData ODBC Driver for Salesforce Marketing in a Linux environment, the driver installation predefines a system DSN. You can modify the DSN by editing the system data sources file (/etc/odbc.ini) and defining the required connection properties.

/etc/odbc.ini

[CData SFMarketingCloud Source] Driver = CData ODBC Driver for Salesforce Marketing Description = My Description User = myUser Password = myPassword

For specific information on using these configuration files, please refer to the help documentation (installed and found online).

Load the RODBC Package

To use the driver, download the RODBC package. In RStudio, click Tools -> Install Packages and enter RODBC in the Packages box.

After installing the RODBC package, the following line loads the package:

library(RODBC)

Note: This article uses RODBC version 1.3-12. Using Microsoft R Open, you can test with the same version, using the checkpoint capabilities of Microsoft's MRAN repository. The checkpoint command enables you to install packages from a snapshot of the CRAN repository, hosted on the MRAN repository. The snapshot taken Jan. 1, 2016 contains version 1.3-12.

library(checkpoint) checkpoint("2016-01-01")

Connect to Salesforce Marketing Data as an ODBC Data Source

You can connect to a DSN in R with the following line:

conn <- odbcConnect("CData SFMarketingCloud Source")

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:

sqlTables(conn)

Execute SQL Queries

Use the sqlQuery function to execute any SQL query supported by the Salesforce Marketing API.

subscriber <- sqlQuery(conn, "SELECT Id, Status FROM Subscriber", believeNRows=FALSE, rows_at_time=1)

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

View(subscriber)

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:

par(las=2,ps=10,mar=c(5,15,4,2)) barplot(subscriber$Status, main="Salesforce Marketing Subscriber", names.arg = subscriber$Id, horiz=TRUE)

Ready to get started?

Download a free trial of the Salesforce Marketing ODBC Driver to get started:

 Download Now

Learn more:

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Icon Salesforce Marketing ODBC Driver

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud ODBC Driver is a powerful tool that allows you to connect with live Salesforce Marketing Cloud, directly from any applications that support ODBC connectivity.

Access Salesforce Marketing Cloud like you would a database - read, write, and update Accounts, Emails, Lists, Subscribers, etc. through a standard ODBC Driver interface.