jcdcodes / soqldump

A simple script to dump Salesforce data to CSV

soqldump

A simple script to dump Salesforce data to CSV.

Install/config

You will need Python 2.7 and the simple_salesforce library installed. Then you'll need to put your Salesforce credentials either in a file called .sfauth (the approach I recommend) or in environment variables.

Installing prerequisites

If you are on a Mac or Linux machine you already have python installed and can skip to the next paragraph. (You want Python 2.7.x, not Python 3.x.) If you are on Windows you'll probably need to download from http://python.org and install as appropriate. You need to be able to successfully say python and pip from a command prompt. (The tutorial installation instructions at https://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/interpreter.html show you how to add python to path environment variable; if python was in C:\python27 then pip will be in C:\python27\scripts.)

Once pip runs, install the simple_salesforce library:

pip install simple_salesforce

When everything is installed properly you should be able to run the following at a command prompt:

$ python
Python 2.7.10 (default, Jun 10 2015, 19:42:47)
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 6.1.0 (clang-602.0.53)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import simple_salesforce
>>>

If that last bit didn't throw any errors, then you have all the requisite software installed.

Now you need to configure the Salesforce credentials that soqldump.py will use. Edit the plain text file called .sfauth (and don't save it as .sfauth.txt, nor sfauth.txt, nor god forbid sfauth.docx) with your username, password, and security token.

Restrict permissions on .sfauth by running chmod 600 .sfauth on Mac/Linux or whatever similar thing one should do on Windows to sensitive files.

Use

python soqldump.py "Id,FirstName,PhoneNumber" Account > name_and_number.csv

The comma separated list of column names (the "API names", not the human friendly names) should be surrounded by double quotes. (No whitespace between the commas.) The table (object) name probably doesn't need double quotes.

On all three platforms, the > means "redirect output to a file of the following name", which in this example is name_and_number.csv. I strongly recommend that you embed the current date and time in the filename. For example:

TS=`date +%Y_%m_%d_%H%M` python soqldump.py "Id,Name,ShoeSize"  "Shoe" > ${TS}_shoesize_and_name.csv

Also, I have occasionally seen this program write blank lines in its output. If on Mac/Linux, remove those by piping the output through sed:

TS=`date +%Y_%m_%d_%H%M` python soqldump.py "Id,Name,ShoeSize"  "Shoe" | sed '/^\s*$/d' > ${TS}_shoesize_and_name.csv

FAQ

Q: Can't I just write "select * from SomeTable" in SOQL?

A: Astonishingly, no!

Q: What if I want to get a list of columns?

A: Use https://github.com/heroku/force. The force binary is actually an excellent piece of software, but I wrote soqldump because for some reason force doesn't have a version of force query that doesn't append where rownum < 2001 to the end of your query. It's maddening.

Q: How about running arbitrary SOQL?

A: Edit the soql variable in the "Query stuff" section of soqldump.py.

Q: Can't I just have a SQL interface to my Salesforce data?

A: If you have a lot of extra money to spend then Heroku Connect will probably do the trick.

License

MIT --- See LICENSE.