Salesforce Bulk API 1 is more useful than Bulk API 2
Salesforce Bulk API 1 was released way back in 2009 and the Bulk API 2.0 was released in 2018, and they are both still officially supported. At a high level they are similar, in that both of them provide a way to send large CSV files to Salesforce and rapidly load them. The Bulk API 2.0 was intended to make the API easier to use - it brings authentication into line with other APIs, and gets rid of the need to break data into batches before uploading it.
ADF Salesforce Connector really doesnt want you to see the Bulk Load results
Azure Data Factory (ADF) is pretty nice. Its actually two different things welded together:
Automating Salesforce Data Imports with Powershell and the Salesforce CLI
Some years ago I wrote about using Powershell to automate the Salesforce Data Loader, the idea being that sometimes you dont want to use an ETL tool (think graphical interface with boxes and arrows and properties dialogs - like Talend or Azure Data Factory) to load data into Salesforce. Sometimes you want to do it with some code or scripts, where you can have low level control of all the details, and maybe track the changes in git.
Moving the blog to Statiq Web
This blog has been running on Blogger since I started it in 2007, but they keep changing their design/templating system and I could be bothered to figure it out again. And the comments are nearly always spam. So I thought I would move to a static blog.
RENXT - automatic download of database for reporting, sql etc
RENXT is the new-ish cloud version of Raiser's Edge (which as I wrote before, still looks suspiciously like Raisers Edge 7). There is a SKY API where you can poke about with the data but if you want to download the whole lot regularly and have a local copy, there is a way to do that too.
Raiser's Edge 7 seems like its going to hang around forever
Quite a lot of the charities I've worked with have used Blackbaud's The Raiser's Edge for fundraising. Version 7 was launched in July 2000 and was a client-server Windows database app. At the time it was very compelling, with lots of features tailored to charity fundraising. I remember being impressed by the Query Editor that was built in:
