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Comment by couchand | Hacker News Reader

This looks great! The UI and docs look very nice. Of course long-term reliability is what really matters in this space. I can definitely see incorporating this into client proposals.

A few things I can't immediately see from the docs: do you support subsetting a data source -- only sync records matching criteria? Do you support to/from different instances of the same connector (e.g. Salesforce to Salesforce)? Can you perform any transformations like map over the data, normalize or denormalize tables, etc?

Many clients I can think of this being most useful for would rather host it themselves, is that an option?

One critique: I can't imagine recommending this to a client without SSL support. I'd highly recommend just baking that in to every tier. It would demonstrate that you're serious about keeping your customers' data secure.

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Thank you!

> do you support subsetting a data source -- only sync records matching criteria?

In a one-way sync from Postgres to Salesforce, yes, you can apply filters using a SQL statement, but we’re working on adding this to the Salesforce side as well as two-way syncs. From your perspective, how would you want to set these filters? A SOQL query, or something else?

> Do you support to/from different instances of the same connector (e.g. Salesforce to Salesforce)?

Yup, our infra is data-source agnostic! But Salesforce <> Salesforce is not heavily tested, so there may be some funky behavior with oauth tokens if you’re trying to connect objects from two different instances during onboarding. Curious what use case you have in mind?

> Can you perform any transformations like map over the data, normalize or denormalize tables, etc?

Besides the one-way SQL filter I mention above, we try to make field mapping easy between the sources by automatically transforming when necessary (e.g., transforming a Salesforce picklist to a Postgres integer and vice versa). But we’re working on allowing users to create more detailed field-level transformations in the next few months.

Thanks for the feedback! Totally hear you on SSL, we’ll move that to every tier.

> From your perspective, how would you want to set these filters? A SOQL query, or something else?

For myself, I want to write SOQL there, though I'd guess many of your target customers will want a point-and-click option. Selecting a list view for that object could be an interesting UX hack that might be worth exploring: there's some Salesforce Labs product that does that.

> Salesforce <> Salesforce is not heavily tested... Curious what use case you have in mind?

I've seen a number of configurations for different purposes, the most common one being sandbox data movements.

Management of multiple production orgs gets complex fast, but there are a few places where a tool like this could find a niche: org migrations come to mind. There's often an interim period where you're two way syncing (even though you'd rather not!) before the org being phased out is done.

Good luck!

Really helpful on both fronts, thanks for the thoughts. Both the sandbox and migration use cases make a lot of sense.

Sorry, forgot to respond to one piece:

> Many clients I can think of this being most useful for would rather host it themselves, is that an option?

Right now you can self-host the associated datasets (like the Postgres event log table), but we're still working on allowing you to self-host the entire service. Stay tuned :)

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