Top 5 Data Connectivity Tutorials of 2015

At the end of the year, it’s nice to look back at what you’ve learned. And if you’ve been following Progress® DataDirect® on our blog, you’ve definitely learned a lot!

Today, we’ve compiled a list of the five most requested tutorials from our customers. Whether you are seeing these for the first time or you are just refreshing your memory, we hope these are helpful!

1. SQL Server Linked Server ODBC Connection to Salesforce from Management Studio

   DataDirect is a trusted name in data connectivity, and many SQL server shops have come to rely on our ODBC drivers using Linked Server to federate data against sources such as DB2, Oracle, Sybase, Postgres, Informix and Progress® OpenEdge®. With the move to the cloud, however, many of these shops are looking for a real-time SQL connection to sources such as Salesforce.com and force.com.

   Sumit Sarkar shows you how to do just that with the DataDirect XE for ODBC Salesforce driver in this tutorial.

2. 9 Steps to Integrate Your External Data Using Linked Server

   Following up on Sumit’s tutorial, Idaliz Baez offers up another method to pull cloud data into your SQL server: Linked Server and Progress® DataDirect Cloud®. Better yet, setting up your DataDirect Cloud connection couldn’t be easier.

   Check out Idaliz’s tutorial on federating your cloud data in nine simple steps.

3. Integrate Your MongoDB Data with MS Access

   Upgrading your data organization doesn’t have to mean ditching beloved tools. Microsoft Access, for example, is an integral part of the workflow of many organizations, and the threat of abandoning it in order to adopt a new data source—such as MongoDB—is enough to convince many companies not to upgrade at all. Luckily, Microsoft Access supports ODBC, making it compatible with the entire suite of DataDirect ODBC data connectors.

   Idaliz Baez showed us how to set up a connection from MongoDB to Microsoft Access earlier this year. Check it out!

4. Pentaho Data Integrator and Real-Time JDBC Connectivity to Salesforce

   No matter the problem you face, we have a solution. When it comes to Salesforce, for example, we have a solution for connecting outside data to Salesforce through Lightning Connect and DataDirect Cloud. We can also connect Salesforce data to BI tools like Tableau through ODBC. Now, you can add JDBC connectivity to Pentaho Data Integrator (PDI) to that list and enable real-time reporting of Salesforce data against back-office data via native JDBC.

   Read the post to get the whole story on establishing a real-time JDBC connection from PDI to Salesforce.

5. Instant Oracle Big Data apps with Database Gateway for ODBC to Hadoop Hive

   Big Data technology goes fast. So fast that many articles on the subject are outdated before they are even published! This tutorial from Sumit Sarkar, however, is still going strong. In it, Sumit offers up a method of shifting “data gravity” back to Oracle applications by federating data from Hadoop Hive with the Oracle Database Gateway and the DataDirect Apache Hadoop Hive ODBC driver. This can allow you to perform lookups against historical transactional data in Hadoop without scheduling on-demand load jobs or physically moving data.

   Get the whole story on enabling Big Data on Oracle apps with Database Gateway here.

More to Come

We’ve learned a lot in the past year, but the world of data connectivity keeps growing and moving forward. Make sure to stay tuned to our blog to keep up to date with all that we have going on in 2016 and beyond!