What is Heroku Connect?

Heroku Connect is an important part of the Salesforce Platform enabling developers to create applications and integrations on Heroku.  Heroku is used by many Salesforce customers to bring startup-style speed and innovation to customer engagement applications, such as mobile loyalty apps (Forever Living, Red Robin).

Heroku Connect is an add-on that synchronizes data between a Heroku Postgres database and a Salesforce org.  This allows developers to build apps, using any Heroku supported language, that interact with Salesforce data in an idiomatic Postgres fashion.  A common use case is using Heroku as the system of engagement and keeping customer data synchronized into Salesforce as the system of record.

Heroku Connect has evolved very quickly in the past year. This is a very good article that gets into the nitty gritty details that every developer using Heroku Connect should know.  Here are some of my favorite enhancements in the past six months.

• Two modes of synchronization: A real-time, event-driven mode; and a polling mode.

• The use of a set of best practices and heuristics to decide between using the Bulk API or our batch-oriented SOAP API to optimize the use of API calls.

• Easy setup and configuration through the Heroku Connect point-and-click interface making setup and maintenance easy and reliable.

• The ability to export and import .yaml configuration files allowing for easy storage, duplication and recovery of your Heroku Connect configurations.

Now You Can Try It – Free!

The next step in this evolution happens today as we announce Heroku Connect Demo Edition.  This is a free, developer focused version of Heroku Connect.  Now you can build proof-of-concepts and try out all the features of Heroku Connect free!

You might be thinking “Free, huh? What’s missing?”  Well, the Heroku Connect Demo Edition does have a row sync limit of 10,000 rows of data per sync, which is plenty to explore the capabilities and use cases that Heroku Connect enables.  Although Streaming API connections are possible with the commercial edition of Heroku Connect, the Developer Edition allows developers to leverage the “Poll Now” button to facilitate testing and development.  Otherwise, it’s got the same functionality and capabilities as the commercial edition.

Get Started Right Now!

You can get started with Heroku Connect Demo Edition today!  Just make sure you have a Heroku account and Salesforce Developer Edition account and use the Heroku Button below.  In a matter of minutes you will have your Salesforce data synchronized into a Postgres database on Heroku, ready to be the data store for any application you want to build.