Salesforce ODBC Driver
Open Access has created an ODBC driver for Salesforce. This allows you to use any ODBC compliant software to access the Salesforce database. You can get a free 30 day trial on their site. I have been playing around with it the past couple days to see how it worked for me in migrating data from one Salesforce environment to another. So for so good. The price seems pretty reasonable too, $99/year for a single user license.
There is also a free option to does pretty much the same thing at Sourceforge. The Forceamp tool allows you to create a Linked Server in SQL Server to your Salesforce instance(s). That tool is free, but requires SQL Server. If you don’t have SQL Server, you can get SQL Server Express free from Microsoft.
Bill Emerson Said,
December 15, 2005 @ 6:22 am
The weblink for DBAmp is broken. For more info on DBAmp, the free, open source SQL connector, see http://sourceforge.net/projects/dbamp/ . There is also additional info on DBAmp at http://www.forceamp.com.