71. Linking Data with Mulesoft

Becky Jaimes is a product manager at Salesforce interviewing Dejim Juang, Master Principal Solutions Engineer at Mulesoft. Recently, Dejim wrote an article describing how to connect Mulesoft with Heroku Postgres as a new data source. The main function of Mulesoft is to integrate with various SOA, SaaS, and APIs, and provide developers with a single integration point. Rather than writing entirely new data ingestion software from scratch, Mulesoft does the heavy lifting of connecting to data sources and responding back with the requested information.

MuleSoft can be used to build integrations between Salesforce and applications outside of that ecosystem through a drag and drop interface. Some use cases where Mulesoft might not be appropriate include building a BPM tool or managing file transfers. Although Mulesoft certainly has these capabilities, they are too fragile and inefficient to be relied upon heavily. In terms of database connections, you can make RESTful API calls to Mulesoft and have it access information across all of your systems. This is especially useful if your customer data is located in one place and your software data is located somewhere else.

Developers can also write their own code to manipulate the data from disparate sources. They can choose to share their project on the Anypoint Exchange, or continue to use it locally. Although Java is the primary language of choice, there are also scripting choices for JavaScript, Python, .Net, and Ruby. Mulesoft also comes with protections against reporting changes from underlying database migrations, as well as issues with connectivity.

Links from this episode

• Dejim Juang's post on the connector between MuleSoft and Heroku Postgres
• docs.mulesoft.com and training.mulesoft.com provide more information on working with Mulesoft