Omnata with Salesforce Connect (External Objects)

This is the most common and full featured way to use Omnata

Salesforce Connect Adapter

Omnata Connect is a custom adapter for Salesforce Connect which allows tables and views from a Snowflake account to be accessed as External Objects.

Whenever an External Object is accessed, the adapter creates a SQL query, executes the query in your data platform via a REST API call, and translates the result back into native Salesforce data types.

External Objects virtualise queried data on-platform without replicating it.

Using External Objects

External Objects behave very similarly to Standard and Custom Objects, but do not offer identical functionality for some platform features.

To understand the differences, refer to Salesforce Platform Features Supported by Salesforce Connect in the Salesforce docs.

Architecture

The below diagram outlines how Omnata fits between Salesforce and your cloud data warehouse.

Omnata runs inside your Salesforce instance as a native app

Use Cases

• Displaying a list of related records on a Salesforce object page

• Displaying the field values of individual records

• Creating reports using standard Salesforce reporting functionality

• Incorporating data from cloud data warehouse tables into Salesforce Flows

• Incorporating data from cloud data warehouse tables into Einstein chatbot responses

Supported Data Types

Per the Salesforce documentation, the following data types are supported by Salesforce Connect:

Salesforce Data type	Description
BOOLEAN_TYPE	Boolean
DATETIME_TYPE	Date/time
EXTERNAL_LOOKUP_TYPE	External lookup relationship
INDIRECT_LOOKUP_TYPE	Indirect lookup relationship
LOOKUP_TYPE	Lookup relationship
NUMBER_TYPE	Number
STRING_LONG_TYPE	Long text area
STRING_SHORT_TYPE	Text area
URL_TYPE	URL