I am currently writing script in PHP to replace my company's current process which uses the Salesforce data loader to download our tables/objects in from our instance. I am sure many companies would like a solid performing data download system that can be relied on to perform what it needs. You can create a system to download each table/object from Salesforce into a local database scheme.

There are many reasons why you would want to create such a system, the main reason that comes to my mind is a data backup. Can you afford to rely on Salesforce with the sensitive sales and other data which is stored on their servers. Now I know that it is highly unlikely that they would have a database crash or some sort of server attach, but never say never, always backup your data.

Now you can choose to implement some sort of sophisticated system from a third party Salesforce consulting company such as BlueWolf. BlueWolf has a add-on to Salesforce that is called the DRE which costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $ 10,000.00 a year, which for some larger corporations is just a drop in the bucket and I am sure it is an outstanding application.

It is my job to find the lowest solution that is 100% reliable and that we can control if there is a change to Salesforce's API, they seem to have one change at least every quarter. If you write this in PHP then you or your developers have 100% control over the changes and nothing is stored in a CSV file. All data in my test scripts goes directly into our database right from our instance of salesforce and the best thing about it is that PHP is free/open source.

I am not sure if I am going to release this as a tutorial or on a one by one basis, so please use the contact form on my site to let me know if you are interested in seeing this tutorial. If I decide to release it then I will publish it to my Blog once testing is complete.

Thanks,
Mike