Monday, November 7, 2016

Salesforce Wave Explained - External Data Upsert, Append and Delete

Most of us are familiar with the Create New Dataset capabilities in Salesforce Wave Analytics.  It's a quick and easy method to import a csv (comma separated values) file into Analytics Cloud.  Behind the scenes, the External Data API is used to load the dataset.

If you have only used the Wave User Interface, you may have though Overwrite was the only available operation. Each time to specify a dataset or update an existing data set with Wave, it overwrites the entire dataset with the new values.

There's a lot more to the External Data API, including the ability to append, upsert and delete data. Let's dig deeper into the capabilities of the External Data API and how to do more than just overwriting data.