External Data Load Retirement

What's being done?

GRAX is ending support for loading external third-party sources into the GRAX data vault.

Why is GRAX retiring support for this feature?

GRAX is always looking for ways to increase data ownership, access, and reuse within the context of tighter data governance rules, stricter protections, and increased data flexibility that our customers require. GRAX has focused on making it easy to move Salesforce backup and archive data downstream for these purposes. Typically, customers already have other data sources downstream and are looking to get their Salesforce data more aligned with this pipeline. With that in mind, we don't believe the legacy feature to load external data directly into the GRAX vault is in the best interests of many of our customers.

What's the recommended workaround?

We recommend using out of the box services to get any non-GRAX-compatible data into your data repository.
AWS Glue is a great tool that facilitates this process of getting the data somewhere convenient for access downstream or from directly within Salesforce. For instance, if you wanted to query this loaded data from Salesforce, you could load data into your S3 data lake, and use Glue to move this data into a database where you can leverage an AWS API to access. Depending on how you decide to load the data into the S3, you could also directly query with AWS Athena, or first clean/transform to better shape the data to your custom use case. There are also similar tools and services available on Azure to quickly load and access data.

Timing

GRAX support for this feature ends in the Summer of 2021. This may be accelerated if changes are needed to protect the integrity of the GRAX service, or if third parties retire a piece of their service which makes the feature unavailable.

How do I get more information?

If you have questions or need more information, please open a support ticket.