Upgrade Databricks for Financial Analytics with CData

Today, organizational success depends on how well they align their data, people, and finances. Many invest in platforms like Databricks to drive data-driven decision-making, but for FP&A teams, a critical piece is often missing—direct access to financial systems.

Databricks is a powerful analytics and Data Lakehouse platform, but it lacks native connectivity to key financial systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and accounting software. Without this direct access, data teams are left dealing with silos, manual exports, and outdated insights, making real-time financial planning and analysis difficult and inefficient.

In this blog, we’ll explore the critical integration challenges facing FP&A teams using Databricks and how CData provides a robust, secure, and scalable solution to bring all your financial systems into one analytics-ready environment.

Why financial data integration matters for FP&A

Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) is only as good as the data that powers it. Accurate forecasting, budgeting, and performance tracking all require up-to-date, complete data from across the organization. That includes data from:

• ERPs (e.g., SAP, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Workday)
• CRMs (e.g., Salesforce, Zoho CRM)
• Accounting systems (e.g., QuickBooks, NetSuite, FreshBooks)

When these systems operate in silos or require manual data movement, FP&A teams lose the ability to deliver timely, strategic insights. With the real-time nature of today’s financial business environment, this delay can lead to missed opportunities, compliance risks, and reduced stakeholder confidence.

The integration gap in Databricks

Organizations invest in Databricks to unify data, scale analytics, and drive innovation. But when it comes to financial analytics, they often run into these roadblocks:

• No native connectivity to financial systems: Databricks doesn’t offer out-of-the-box support for critical systems like SAP, Workday, or QuickBooks. Integration typically requires custom pipelines, third-party tools, or manual processes.
• Siloed systems and disconnected models: Without direct connections, data from ERPs, CRMs, and accounting software remains fragmented, making it hard to build unified financial models and draw meaningful insights.
• Real-time needs in a dynamic environment: Financial data changes constantly. Static snapshots or delayed imports don’t cut it. FP&A teams need near-real-time access to make decisions with confidence.

In other words, without seamless data connectivity, even a robust platform like Databricks can underdeliver on its promise for financial analytics.

CData and Databricks: The FP&A integration accelerator

Enter CData Integration Accelerator for Databricks, a purpose-built solution to address these challenges head-on. Whether you're a data engineer supporting FP&A or a finance leader seeking better insight into your organization’s performance, CData empowers you to:

• Connect directly to financial systems
  CData offers seamless connectivity to over 350 data sources, including all major ERP, CRM, and accounting systems. This allows you to connect Databricks directly to your financial platforms without complex custom code or slow batch processes, ensuring fast, reliable access to the data that drives FP&A.

• Enable near-real-time financial analytics
  With built-in change data capture (CDC) capabilities, CData ensures your Databricks environment reflects the latest data from operational systems, supporting real-time dashboards, alerts, and planning models that adapt as your business evolves.

• Correlate data across financial systems
  CData enables semantic modeling and cross-system joins, making it easy to combine ERP data with CRM, HR, and other business data. Create unified models for budgeting, forecasting, and cash flow analysis without jumping between tools.

• Ensure enterprise-grade security and governance
  Financial data is among the most sensitive information in any organization. CData offers robust role-based access control, encryption, and audit logging to ensure compliance with regulations like SOC 2, GDPR, CCPA, and industry best practices.

• Predictable pricing, lower total cost of ownership
  Unlike many complex ETL platforms with unpredictable consumption-based pricing, CData offers a transparent pricing model, helping FP&A teams stay within budget and avoid spiraling data integration costs.

Implementation guide: How CData fits into your Databricks architecture

Integrating CData into your Databricks environment is straightforward and flexible, whether you're building ETL pipelines or enabling live data access. Here's a high-level look at how it works:

Technical architecture overview

• ETL workflows: Use CData Sync to extract and load financial data directly into your Databricks environment for transformation and analysis.
• Live data access: Query real-time data directly from the source using the Databricks Spark engine via CData JDBC drivers, enabling up-to-date insights without data duplication.

CData Sync – ETL integration

1. Connect to a source: Set up a secure connection in CData Sync to your financial data source (e.g., SAP, Dynamics 365, Salesforce).
2. Configure Databricks as a destination: Add Databricks as a target in CData Sync.
3. Create, schedule, and run jobs: Define an ETL job(s) in CData Sync to pull data from your financial systems into Databricks on a scheduled or real-time basis, ensuring data freshness.
   
   

Refer to this knowledge base article for detailed steps on connecting SAP as a source and Databricks as a destination to perform ETL in CData Sync.

Power up your Databricks investment with CData Sync

Whether you’re building forecasts, performing cost analyses, or guiding strategic decisions, CData Sync helps you access complete, up-to-date financial data right inside your Databricks workspace. So, why wait? Sign up today for a 30-day free trial of CData Sync and experience the ease of high-volume data replication and CDC.

As always, our support team is ready to answer any questions you have. Have you joined the CData Community? Ask questions, get answers, and share your knowledge of CData connectivity tools. Join us!