Follow and complete a Learn MOAR Winter ‘23 trailmix for admins or developers by November 30, 2022, 11:59 pm PT, to earn a special community badge and enter for a chance to win one of five $200 USD Salesforce Certification vouchers. Restrictions apply. Learn how to participate and review the Official Rules by visiting the Trailhead Quests page.

The world’s leading cloud provider and the #1 CRM platform are making it easier for developers using both technologies to build and launch customer applications, natively leverage AWS services in Salesforce, and securely connect data and workflows across both Salesforce and AWS.

Salesforce & AWS logos

As part of the Winter ’23 release, Salesforce is making the Salesforce and AWS platforms even more interoperable, adding new products and expanded functionality. This interoperability is critical since organizations of all sizes leverage both Salesforce and AWS to deliver modern, omni-channel customer experiences. Our customers rely on Salesforce to effectively manage customer relationships and often build applications on the Salesforce Platform that leverage AWS’s unique compute, storage, and database offerings. We are working alongside our AWS counterparts to deliver a unified development platform for Salesforce and AWS developers, securely connecting data and automating workflows across both platforms.

The Salesforce Connect adapter for Amazon Athena lets Salesforce developers and administrators virtualize structured data stored in Amazon S3, Redshift, and other data stores, and treat the data as if it were stored within the Salesforce Platform. This is particularly useful for teams that have built data lakes backed by S3 to leverage highly durable storage at comparatively low cost.

Data virtualization, not ETL

Many data integration strategies revolve around ETL (extract, transform, and load) tools that move or sync data between two systems, copying the information from the system of record to other applications that need to leverage some or all of those records. These integrations need to be monitored and maintained by highly skilled teams and are complicated by DynamoDB’s capability to aggregate query results from high-scale stores both within and outside of AWS’s global infrastructure.

Virtualization avoids the heavy lifting of syncing such large volumes of data by making live callouts to Athena’s API endpoints at the moment when some user or system action requires those records. Only the data needed for that particular action is queried via SQL, and Salesforce Connect does not store or cache the records returned by the server. This approach helps customers manage costs, avoid technical hassles, and stay within security and compliance guidelines regarding data movement.

Salesforce Connect leverages standard SQL queries to access Amazon Athena and enable External Objects usable across the Salesforce Platform by tools like Flow and Lightning App Builder.

External Objects surface data residing in Amazon S3 in a way that allows administrators to take advantage of features offered by the Salesforce Platform, such as Flow Builder, Indirect Lookups to native objects, and more. Developers can even write SOQL queries and Apex against this data service without writing custom code to access Athena, S3, or a myriad of other back-end data stores. In short, Salesforce trailblazers don’t have to re-skill to leverage high scale data on AWS.

Getting started

If you’ve never worked with External Objects before, start with this quick start on Trailhead to get your feet wet with Salesforce Connect. And when you’re ready to dive deeper, this trail map covers everything you need to succeed with data virtualization. Additional specifics on working with Athena in Salesforce Connect are available under Help & Training, and your account representative can help you get Salesforce Connect licensed in your production org.

Stay tuned

The Salesforce Connect Adapter for Amazon Athena is just one of multiple products that Salesforce is releasing with Winter ’23 supporting Amazon and Salesforce interoperability. Check out all the products included in this release. And stay tuned to this blog space for more specifics on Event Relay for AWS, Private Connect, and other now generally available products built for you.

See these new features in action!

Don’t forget to watch the Winter ’23 Developer Preview on September 22 during Release Readiness Live to see demos of a subset of these new, exciting features. And if you’re attending Dreamforce, join us LIVE! Be sure to check out the Learn MOAR Winter ’23 for Developers Trailmix and follow along on the blog this week for more Learn MOAR!

About the author

Ross Belmont
Ross Belmont is a Director of Product Management covering Platform Data Services. He has more than a decade of experience with the Salesforce ecosystem.

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