Build Salesforce Marketing-Connected Dashboards in Redash

Redash lets you connect and query your data sources, build dashboards to visualize data and share them with your company. When paired with CData Connect Server, you get instant, cloud-to-cloud access to Salesforce Marketing data for visualizations, dashboards, and more. This article shows how to create a virtual database for Salesforce Marketing and build visualizations from Salesforce Marketing data in Redash.

CData Connect Server provides a pure SQL Server interface for Salesforce Marketing, allowing you to easily build reports from live Salesforce Marketing data in Redash — without replicating the data to a natively supported database. As you build visualizations, Redash generates SQL queries to gather data. Using optimized data processing out of the box, CData Connect Server pushes all supported SQL operations (filters, JOINs, etc) directly to Salesforce Marketing, leveraging server-side processing to quickly return the requested Salesforce Marketing data.

Create a Virtual SQL Server Database for Salesforce Marketing Data

CData Connect Server uses a straightforward, point-and-click interface to connect to data sources and generate APIs.

1. Login to Connect Server and click Connections.
2. Select "Salesforce Marketing" from Available Data Sources.
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 Save Changes
5. Click Privileges -> Add and add the new user (or an existing user) with the appropriate permissions.

With the virtual database created, you are ready to connect to Salesforce Marketing data from Redash.

Visualize Salesforce Marketing Data in Redash

The steps below outline creating a new data source in Redash based on the virtual Salesforce Marketing database in Connect Server and building a simple visualization from the data.

Create a New Data Source

1. Log into Redash, click on your profile and click "Data Sources"
2. Click the " New Data Source" button
3. Select "Microsoft SQL Server" as the Data Source Type
4. On the configuration tab, set the following properties:
   • Name: Name the data source (e.g. Salesforce Marketing (CData Connect))
   • Host: The full URL to your CData Connect instance (e.g. https://connect_server_url)
   • Port: The port of the CData Connect SQL Server endpoint (e.g. 1433)
   • User: A CData Connect user
   • Password: The password for the above user
   • Database name: The name of the virtual database for Salesforce Marketing (e.g. SFMarketingCloud1)
   • Click the checkbox to Use SSQL
5. Click Create
6. Click the "Test Connection" button to ensure you have configured the connection properly

With the new Data Source created, we are ready to visualize our Salesforce Marketing data.

Create a Salesforce Marketing Data Visualization

1. Click Create -> New Query
2. Select the newly created Data Source (you can explore the data structure in the New Query wizard)
3. Write a SQL statement to retrieve the data, for example:
   SELECT Id, Status FROM Subscriber
4. Click the "Execute" button to load Salesforce Marketing data into Redash via CData Connect
5. Use the Visualization Editor to create and analyze graphs from Salesforce Marketing data
6. You can schedule the query to refresh and update the visualization periodically

SQL Access to Salesforce Marketing Data from Cloud Applications

At this point, you have a direct, cloud-to-cloud connection to Salesforce Marketing data from Redash. You can create new visualizations, build dashboards, and more. For more information on gaining SQL access to data from more than 100 SaaS, Big Data, and NoSQL sources from cloud applications like Redash, refer to our Connect Server page.