Heroku recently announced the Heroku Postgres Connector for Data Cloud, which allows developers to easily connect a Postgres database to Data Cloud. In just a few minutes and a few clicks, you can set up the new connector and have your data ingested, mapped, and synced between a Heroku Postgres database and Data Cloud’s data lake. This blog post explores the new Heroku PostgreSQL Connector, why it is important for developers, and the new possibilities that it opens for Heroku applications.

What is Heroku?

Heroku is a cloud platform that allows companies to build, deploy, monitor, and scale applications quickly and easily. It’s designed to help developers focus on writing code rather than managing infrastructure. With Heroku, developers write their application code and push it to a repository, and Heroku’s managed infrastructure handles the rest. It supports a wide range of programming languages and provides various services and add-ons, like Heroku Postgres, providing a comprehensive ecosystem for application development and deployment.

What is Heroku Postgres?

Heroku Postgres is a highly scalable managed PostgreSQL database service offered by Heroku. It’s one of the largest managed database offerings, serving a vast number of customers. Heroku Postgres is designed to store and manage application data, including data related to customer information and interactions. Applications on Heroku generate valuable data that can be used to gain insights into customer behavior and usage patterns. By integrating data from Heroku Postgres with Salesforce Data Cloud, businesses can consolidate and unify customer data from various sources. This unified customer data can then be used to create comprehensive customer profiles, enabling those businesses to gain a deeper understanding of their customers and deliver more personalized experiences.

What is Salesforce Data Cloud?

Salesforce Data Cloud is a data platform that is built to scale. It integrates disparate and disconnected systems to create a unified view of a customer by ingesting and harmonizing data from multiple data streams into its data lake. Additionally, Data Cloud can be used easily and natively across the entire Einstein 1 Platform. Data Cloud data can be segmented and used to build audiences to power Marketing Cloud journeys to send personalized email and text messages, power analytics in Tableau, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) models in Model Builder. Data Cloud’s data can also be virtualized on Salesforce Account, Contact, and Lead records as related lists with enrichments to help build a single point of view of your customers.

Why use Heroku with Data Cloud?

The Heroku PostgreSQL Connector opens many exciting use cases to Salesforce Data Cloud. Here are just a few:

More Powerful Unified Customer Profiles: The new Heroku PostgreSQL Connector introduces an additional source of data that can now be ingested and harmonized into Data Cloud’s data lake. Applications built on Heroku that are using Postgres for their database can now feed their data into Data Cloud. This data can be virtualized on Account, Contact, and Lead records through enrichments to build a single point of view of your customer.

More Activations: By syncing data from Heroku Postgres to Data Cloud, you can create automations based on how your customers interact with your app. Depending on a customer’s interactions, you can automate sending personalized text or email messages, and easily feed the data into other systems like Tableau for reporting.

Heroku and Data Cloud Hybrid Architecture

Considerations Before Getting Started with the Heroku Postgres Connector

Here are some considerations to keep in mind before jumping in:

Salesforce Data Cloud Heroku PostgreSQL Connector Set Up

Setting up the connector is easy with a point-and-click UI. All you need is the database credentials for your Heroku Postgres database and Data Cloud enabled in your Salesforce org to set up the connector.

To get started, you will need the credentials and other details for your database. You can find these under Settings in Heroku after you have selected the Application name and Database name.

Image of the administration menu of Heroku with Host, Database, User, Port, Password, URI, Heroku CLI.

In Salesforce, navigate to Data Cloud Setup > Connectors > New and select the Heroku Postgres connector, as shown below.

Image of the Heroku PostgreSQL Connector selected.

Next, enter a Connection Name, the Username and Password for the integration user, the Connection URL (which is the Host in Heroku settings), and the database name in the Database field.

Image of new Heroku Postgres Connection page with fields for Authentication Details and Connection Details

Click Save. When the connection is set up, you will see it with an Active status along with any other connectors you have set up.

Image of a list of the Active connectors in the setup menu.

You can create a Data Stream by navigating to the Data Cloud application using your app launcher and then to the Data Streams tab. You will see Heroku as an available source to ingest data from.

Image of Connectors on the New Data Stream page

Conclusion

Now that you know more about Heroku, Salesforce Data Cloud, and the power of both applications when they are combined using the new Heroku PostgreSQL Connector, be sure to take a few minutes to check out Heroku’s public roadmap on GitHub and learn what new features and enhancements are coming to the Heroku platform.

Resources

About the Authors

Julián Duque is a Principal Developer Advocate at Heroku, with a strong focus on community, education, Node.js, and JavaScript. He loves sharing knowledge and empowering others to become better developers.

Danielle Larregui is a Senior Developer Advocate for Data Cloud. She enjoys engaging with developers, attending user group meetings, and speaking at community events and conferences.

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