Prepare, Blend, and Analyze Salesforce Marketing Data in Alteryx Designer

Alteryx is a software platform that allows people to work with data more easily. When paired with CData Connect Cloud, Alteryx provides instant access to Salesforce Marketing data from your data automation processes. This article demonstrates how to connect to Salesforce Marketing using Connect Cloud and work with Salesforce Marketing data in Alteryx.

CData Connect Cloud offers a dedicated SQL Server interface for Salesforce Marketing, facilitating data querying without the need for data replication to a native database. With built-in optimized data processing capabilities, CData Connect Cloud efficiently directs all supported SQL operations, including filters and JOINs, straight to Salesforce Marketing. This harnesses server-side processing to rapidly retrieve the desired Salesforce Marketing data.

Configure Salesforce Marketing Connectivity for Alteryx

Connectivity to Salesforce Marketing from Alteryx is made possible through CData Connect Cloud. To work with Salesforce Marketing data from Alteryx, we start by creating and configuring a Salesforce Marketing connection.

1. Log into Connect Cloud, click Connections and click Add Connection
2. Select "Salesforce Marketing" from the Add Connection panel
3. Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to Salesforce Marketing.

   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.

4. Click Create & Test
5. Navigate to the Permissions tab in the Add Salesforce Marketing Connection page and update the User-based permissions.

Connect to Salesforce Marketing from Alteryx

Once you establish a connection to Salesforce Marketing in Connect Cloud, you are ready to work with Salesforce Marketing data in Alteryx. To begin, download the ODBC Driver for CData Connect.

1. In the ODBC Driver for CData Connect, select OAuth and click Test Connection. Then enter your CData Connect Cloud Credentials and Sign in.
2. Open Alteryx Designer and create a new workflow.
3. Drag and drop a new input data tool onto the workflow.
4. Click the drop down under Connect a File or Database and select the Data sources tab.
5. Navigate to the end of the page and click on ODBC under Generic connection.
6. Select the DSN that you configured for use in Alteryx.
7. In the wizard that opens, drag and drop the table to be queried in the Query Builder box. Select the fields by checking the boxes that you wish to include in your query. Where possible, the complex queries generated by the filters and aggregations will be pushed down to your data source, while any unsupported operations (which can include SQL functions and JOIN operations) will be managed client-side by the CData SQL engine embedded in the connector.

To further customize the dataset, you can open the SQL Editor and modify the query manually, adding clauses, aggregations, and other operations to ensure that you are retrieving exactly the data desired.

With the query defined, you are ready to work with your data in Alteryx Designer.

Get CData Connect Cloud

To get live data access to 100+ SaaS, Big Data, and NoSQL sources directly from your SQL Server database, try CData Connect Cloud today!