New Versions of ODBC Drivers for Salesforce, Dynamics 365, and Zoho CRM

We are glad to announce new versions of the ODBC drivers for Salesforce, Dynamics 365, and Zoho CRM. The most notable updates include OAuth 2.0 authentication for Dynamics 365 and Salesforce, and SOQL queries for Salesforce.

OAuth 2.0 authentication was supported in the ODBC drivers for Dynamics 365 and Salesforce. If you are not yet familiar with the term, OAuth is an open standard for authorization which web applications like Dynamics 365 or Salesforce can use to provide client applications, such as our ODBC drivers, with secure access to certain resources over HTTPS. You need to login to the web application only once to authorize the driver to access your data and generate a refresh token. After that, the driver will use the token to authenticate itself to Dynamics 365 or Salesforce with each subsequent API call, and will not have to submit your username and password to the web application over the network. This approach is way more secure than the basic authentication scheme with username/password.

You can use the Salesforce Object Query Language (SOQL) syntax with the new version of our ODBC driver to query Salesforce data. SOQL is an optimized version of SQL specifically designed for accessing the underlying Salesforce database. It does not support some of the SQL advanced features like wildcards and joins, but allows using filters along with the SELECT clause to return an optional set of data.

SOQL is intended exclusively for querying the Salesforce database rather than modifying data with INSERT or UPDATE statements. SOQL queries are used for retrieving data only from Salesforce related objects. Since our ODBC driver for Salesforce now understands both the SQL and SOQL syntax, you should prefix SOQL queries with SOQL: to make the ODBC driver aware that you want to use the SOQL syntax, as in the following example:

SOQL:SELECT Contact.FirstName, Contact.Account.Name FROM Contact

A new property called NonApprovedRecords was added in the ODBC driver for Zoho CRM to enable users to retrieve records that are pending for approval. You can view the list of records pending for your approval from the Approve Leads/Contacts/Cases feature in your Zoho CRM account.

You are welcome to download and try the new versions: