Comment by stephen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stephen | Hacker News Reader

Interesting! Any plans for SalesForce support?

We'd love to have a way to easily sync our internal system's data in/out of SFDC.

...and a source of GraphQL? :-)

One of our engineers recently suggested syncing our PG database to Airtable, solely b/c Airtable has out-of-the-box SFDC integration (webhooks/etc), so our SFDC team could get at the data easier than they could from our PG database.

I'm hesitant about "Airtable as our official 3rd-party integration strategy", but it does make me pine for a "protocol" for one-way/two-way real-time/batch syncing between two systems that just want to share "dumb" tables+fields/entities.

I was thinking Zapier might have that, like if we implemented the Zapier-TM backend protocol on top of our custom system, and it would ~insta integrate with everything, but in my ~10 minutes of scanning their docs, it seemed less "protocol" and more "configure all the things via clicking around".

No near-term plan for Salesforce support from us, but that's an interesting use-case. Definitely check out the other tools folks mentioned if you haven't already, they should be able to get you most of the way there.

Is your team looking to do a 2-way sync between PG and SF for certain fields? Or is the use case something where data from SF needs to be enriched with data from PG and then pushed back to SF (or vice versa)? I'm curious to know which fields need to be synced that way.

With the approach your engineer recommended, it seems to imply that the sales team might also want to update data manually and those updates should be reflected in both PG and SF - is my understanding correct?

Hi jimmy! Yep, invariably the ask always ends up to be 2-way syncing. :-/

Fwiw realistically I think these things are generally best written as custom software anyway, b/c things like identity (of entities/mapping ids correctly across both systems), the inevitable field mapping, etc. always come up, and with custom software I can write tests for all of them. :-)

Two-way is definitely more convenient. Custom could be a good approach, but could get difficult to maintain due corner cases or as schemas change from either side. I'd be curious to know how you end up solving for this! Good luck!

Meltano[0] might be of interest to you. Easy way to move data that should be very familiar for software engineers. If a connector doesn't exist our SDK makes it easy to build it.

[0] https://github.com/meltano/meltano

(disclaimer - I work at Meltano)

Check out https://sequin.io/ I think it’s pretty much exactly what you’re looking for. Awesome team behind it too.

Hey Stephen,

I would check out http://hightouch.com/. You can easily sync data from a warehouse to SFDC. You can also sync PG -> Airtable as well!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com