Introducing Salesforce Connectors for Lakehouse Federation and LakeFlow Connect

We are excited to announce a range of new integrations that will allow our customers to access and derive insights from their data in Salesforce CRM and Data Cloud seamlessly from Databricks.

Last year, we announced our strategic partnership with Salesforce to deliver a seamless integration experience with Salesforce Data Cloud. Since then, we’ve been hard at work building integrations across various surfaces. In March 2024, Salesforce made their Salesforce Bring Your Own Model (BYOM) with Databricks (backed by Databricks Mosaic Model Serving) and Zero Copy Data Federation integration with Databricks SQL Warehouse generally available.

Today, we are expanding this portfolio. These connectors enable the full data lifecycle of a Databricks and Salesforce integration by making data in Salesforce CRM (Sales Cloud) and Salesforce Data Cloud directly accessible in Databricks Unity Catalog:

Access Salesforce data from Databricks:

• Databricks Lakehouse Federation - Salesforce Data Cloud Connector. Update: Now Generally Available (GA) as of September 17, 2024. Read more about the GA release.
• Databricks LakeFlow Connect - Salesforce Ingestion Connector. Now in Public Preview.

Access Databricks data and models from Salesforce:

• Salesforce Zero Copy Data Federation Integration with Databricks SQL Warehouse
• Salesforce Bring Your Own Model (BYOM) with Databricks Mosaic AI

Removing barriers to innovate with Salesforce

While data and technology leaders acknowledge the importance of activating their data with AI, many organizations struggle to make their data accessible to the right teams due to the complexity and the sprawl of tooling required to integrate these systems.

To support the different lines of business leveraging Salesforce, data teams need to build and maintain connectors and pipelines, collect and prepare the data, and make it available to data science teams for analysis and experimentation. Additionally, data teams need to join and aggregate the data with other data sources, and serve the data and ML models back to the lines of business so that it can be used and actioned upon from within the Salesforce platform.

This leads to ever-increasing complexity and tends to be more fragile than native solutions. This is why we built the Zero Copy integrations with Data Cloud as well as LakeFlow Connect with Salesforce CRM.

Lakehouse Federation - Salesforce Data Cloud Connector

Lakehouse Federation helps customers unify their data estate in Unity Catalog, allowing them to discover, query, and govern all data through a single query interface without moving it first. With the new Salesforce Data Cloud Connector, customers can now find and query Salesforce Data Cloud directly from Unity Catalog. Behind the scenes, as users write queries in Databricks, Lakehouse Federation will automatically submit them into Salesforce Data Cloud for federated query execution and retrieve the results. Additionally, users can apply rules like row and column level security, tag-based policies, centralized auditing consistently across platforms, track data usage, and meet compliance requirements with built-in data lineage and auditability.

This complements Salesforce’s Zero Copy Federation integration, which enables customers to discover and query data managed in Databricks directly from Salesforce Data Cloud through federation query execution. Together, the Salesforce Zero Copy Data Federation integration and Databricks Lakehouse Federation connector to Salesforce Data Cloud enable customers to discover and access data bidirectionally, no matter where it is stored.

"The new bi-directional federation solution to Data Cloud is a game changer for our customers, unlocking unprecedented value from their data assets. By seamlessly integrating the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform with Salesforce Data Cloud, we're enabling organizations to harness the full potential of their data for a richer customer 360, AI-driven insights and personalized customer experiences. We are excited to continue strengthening our strategic partnership with Databricks, delivering innovative solutions that empower businesses to thrive in the data-driven economy."

—  Narinder Singh, VP Data Cloud, Salesforce

LakeFlow Connect - Salesforce Connector

Databricks customers commonly need additional insights from their Salesforce environments beyond what’s available in Salesforce Data Cloud. Ingesting Salesforce Sales data into Databricks and joining these CRM insights with data in the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform will allow data teams to deliver additional insights and more accurate predictions.

This is why we’ve introduced a new LakeFlow Connect ingestion connector for Salesforce CRM. LakeFlow Connect provides ingestion connectors that any practitioner can use to build incremental data pipelines at scale. This includes Databricks-native connectors for databases, file sources, and enterprise applications. Setting up a connector takes just a few steps in a UI or an API. Once the connector is set up, it’s easy to maintain, with robust observability, alerting, and more. The connector also integrates with the rest of the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform: governed by Unity Catalog, powered by Delta Live Tables, and orchestrated with Workflows.

What’s next?

Leveraging all these features together provides organizations with an expanded set of data management capabilities on top of Data Cloud. Additionally, data science teams can support Marketing teams through BYOM with ML models and enriched attributes to be used in Salesforce Data Cloud to create segments for campaigns and tasks that can be actioned against, driving near real-time business value across a rich set of applications.

We plan to bring the LakeFlow Connector for Salesforce to more Databricks customers soon.