Hi, I am not a current Knime user. I work primarily with Salesforce as an Administrator. But many moons ago recall working somewhere that used Knime along with Salesforce and other systems to pull together data. What I want to know is, is Knime used to help merge and integrate data that can come from different sources, as long as there is one common theme/field that can be linked? We have approx 3-4 systems that do not “speak” to each other, and I’m looking for a tool that can be used to help merge data and possibly push that merged data into Salesforce.
i cannot give advice directly for SalesForce but in general i would say that KNIME does the merging and integration of multiple systems quite well.
It supports most if not all databases, has default connectors and API support for most common systems as well as for various file types and file systems.
At least we mostly use KNIME for the exact task you described and are quite happy with it
E.g. gather data from 1 operational tool through sftp/rest/soap, combine the data with additional data from 1-2 databases with different dialects, download a manual mamaged sharepoint file and finally push the data to Tableau/Excel is not that hard to do.
For the actual linking of data I would say - as long as you can define exactly how the data should be linked manually there should not be a problem to do that in KNIME automatically.
(which could be said for most ETL tools as well. i guess )
But it really depends on the systems you use and what access possibilities there are.
I have used Knime with Salesforce actually. I’m not an expert in Salesforce, but it provides api to access different data. I helped automate a process where they were manually communicating with Salesforce via Soap APIs, and they were submitting the Soap requests via SoapUI.
Anything that you can submit via GET or POST, you can do in Knime via the GET Request and the POST Request nodes.
@barnesrachele I think KNIME is very well suited to handle various data sources. As a platform it can use data on our within a database (or other system) as well as pull three data into KNIME and combine and analyze them, and bring the results back to wherever you need them.
One limiting factor is memory and disk space if the data you want to download is becoming very very large.
Also you will have to have a connector or driver to access the data. Often you can also use a custom driver (JDBC, ODBC…) if there is no dedicated node like in this case:
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