GRAX on Heroku: Empowering Your Data Management Strategy

With organizations producing terabytes and petabytes of data, a data management strategy has never been more important. Enter GRAX on Heroku, the solution that’s changing how businesses manage their Salesforce data. By using all of your data—every version—GRAX lets you see more, be compliant, and grow.

The Power of History

One of the best parts of our solution is that we capture and reuse all your data’s history. Imagine having all versions and snapshots of your data from the very beginning to today. This historical dataset is a treasure trove for organizations looking to gain more insight, comply with regulations, and make better decisions.

Historical data lets you do trend analysis, forecast outcomes, and see long-term patterns that would otherwise be hidden. For example, a sales team can analyze historical sales data to see seasonal trends and adjust their strategy accordingly. A customer support team can analyze historical case records to reduce customer churn and improve customer retention.

With GRAX on Heroku, you can trust that you have the highest fidelity and data quality to make better data-driven decisions. 

What is Heroku?

Before we get started, let’s talk about Heroku. The Heroku platform is a cloud-based Platform as a Service (PaaS) that allows companies to build, run, operate, and scale applications. Known for its ease of deployment, scalability, and support for multiple programming languages (i.e. Python, Ruby, Java, Node.js, and others), Heroku supports and provides a flexible environment for modern application development—including Heroku add-ons.

Heroku add-ons are components that support your application, such as data storage, monitoring, analytics, data processing, and more. GRAX is a Heroku add-on that removes the complexity of Salesforce data management so you can focus on your data management strategy for better outcomes.

Data Management Strategy Use Cases

Data Backup, Archive, Recovery, and Sandbox Seeding

With the rise of cyber threats, having robust backup, archival, and recovery solutions in place is a non-negotiable. Our solution ensures that your data is always protected and recoverable, providing peace of mind and business continuity. With GRAX, you can easily backup and archive your data, ensuring that it is preserved for future reference and compliance purposes.

In the event of data loss or corruption, our recovery capabilities enable you to restore your data quickly and efficiently, minimizing downtime and disruption. Additionally, GRAX supports sandbox seeding, allowing you to create realistic test environments with accurate historical data. This capability is invaluable for development and testing purposes, enabling you to validate new features and changes in a safe and controlled environment.

Downstream Data Consumption 

One of the most powerful aspects of GRAX is its ability to enable data reuse across multiple industry-standard applications. Here are a few examples of how GRAX facilitates data reuse:

GRAX for Excel

Integrating historical data into Excel is a breeze with our GRAX for Excel Data Connector. By leveraging this connector, you can simply import all historical versions of data into Excel for advanced analysis and reporting. This integration enables you to conduct in-depth analysis, create complex models, and generate comprehensive reports, all within the familiar Excel environment.

GRAX for Tableau

Visualizing data trends and insights is made easy with GRAX for Tableau. By integrating GRAX with Tableau, you can create stunning visualizations that bring your history to life. This data connector allows you to explore all versions of your history, identify trends, and uncover insights that drive better decision-making. Whether it’s creating dashboards, reports, or interactive visualizations, GRAX for Tableau makes it easy to leverage your historical data for business intelligence.

GRAX Portal on Heroku

The new GRAX Portal on Heroku showcases the power of GRAX Data Lakehouse and data reuse capabilities. This enables you to access and utilize historical data in innovative ways. Whether it’s integrating with other applications, conducting advanced analytics, or creating custom solutions, the GRAX Portal highlights the versatility and power of GRAX on Heroku’s capabilities.

GRAX on Heroku Data Platform Tech Stack

GRAX was purpose-built to be a powerful data platform that provides organizations with the ability to protect their Salesforce data and its value throughout its lifecycle:

• From data capture and collection,
• To data storage, access, and protection,
• To data reuse in training/testing and downstream consumption, 
• And finally to data archival and deletion.

With GRAX on Heroku, its tech stack consists of several layers, each designed to optimally handle specific aspects of data management.

Foundational Layer: Heroku

The foundation layer provides the underlying infrastructure that powers GRAX. Heroku’s cloud-based platform offers a reliable, scalable, and secure environment for running applications. By leveraging GRAX on Heroku, ensures that your data management solution is built on a strong and scalable foundation, capable of handling the demands of modern data operations.

Ingestion Layer

Next up is the ingestion layer, which is responsible for seamlessly capturing data from Salesforce—Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Industry Clouds, and Commerce Cloud. GRAX’s powerful ingestion capabilities ensure that data is automatically collected at the highest frequency possible and replicated down, providing a comprehensive view of your organization’s history and data lineage. 

This layer supports continuous data ingestion built on Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) technology, enabling you to work with the most accurate data snapshots over time and the most up-to-date information available.

Storage Layer

Once Salesforce data is ingested, it needs to be securely stored. GRAX’s storage layer provides scalable cloud-storage-agnostic key value store for terabytes of data. This ensures data security and supports your data governance needs—never leaving your customer-owned environment—and your data remains easily accessible when and where needed. 

GRAX on Heroku offers a reliable way to operate that reduces costs while maintaining extremely high reliability.

Access Layer

The access layer is built with innovative data indexing technology that powers lightning-fast querying, data management, auditing, and recovery—accomplished without the cost and complexity of a traditional relational database. It provides easy access to all history for various applications and use cases. Whether you need to retrieve data for compliance purposes, conduct advanced analytics, or integrate with other tools, GRAX ensures that your data is readily available. 

With GRAX, you also have access to all your history (whether it was backed up or archived) in your production Salesforce environment using our Salesforce Lightning Web Components. 

Processing Layer

The processing layer handles the transformation and preparation of data to ensure it is in the right format and structure for fast and easy analysis and reporting—making data available in Parquet format, APIs, and GRAX Data Connectors. GRAX’s processing capabilities are designed to handle large volumes of data efficiently, ensuring easy access for downstream consumption.

Insights Layer

Finally, the insights layer is where the magic happens. This layer empowers your organization to derive actionable insights from your data via downstream consumption in business intelligence (BI), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), data analytics, and data warehousing. With powerful analytics and visualization capabilities just clicks away, you can uncover hidden patterns, trends, and correlations that drive better data-driven decision-making. GRAX integrates seamlessly with popular analytics tools like Tableau and Excel, making it easy to visualize and analyze your data. 

Additionally, the new GRAX Portal for Heroku is easily deployable and acts as the primary source for any and many of these endpoint solutions.

GRAX on Heroku: Click to Deploy

One of the standout features of GRAX on Heroku is its simplicity and efficiency in deployment. With a few clicks, you can deploy GRAX on Heroku, significantly reducing the time and effort typically associated with setting up a comprehensive data management platform. This streamlined deployment process allows your data teams to focus on more valuable activities like data modeling uncovering data insights rather than getting bogged down in technical configurations.

The click-to-deploy functionality not only accelerates the setup process but also ensures that your data management solution is up and running quickly, enabling you to start reaping the benefits of GRAX without delay.

Technical Walkthrough

To learn more about how to deploy GRAX on Heroku, check out our installation guide that outlines this process step-by-step. The guide covers everything from initial setup to advanced configuration, ensuring that you can get up and running quickly and efficiently. 

For more information, refer to the GRAX Heroku Installation Guide.

Summary

GRAX on Heroku offers a powerful and comprehensive solution for data management, enabling organizations to harness the full potential of their history. By leveraging every version of your data, GRAX empowers you to gain deeper insights, ensure compliance, and drive business innovation. With its robust data platform stack, easy deployment, and powerful data reuse capabilities, GRAX on Heroku is the ideal solution for Salesforce developers, data engineers, and Salesforce admins looking to enhance their data management strategy.