Updating Salesforce from Oracle®

The Salesforce ODBC Driver enables you to work with Salesforce data from Oracle® as though the Salesforce data was local Oracle® data. You can do this from Oracle® running on both Windows and non-Windows platforms.

This blog shares a workaround for an issue that one of our customers experienced when attempting to updating a Salesforce object from Oracle®. The error the customer got was:

"ORA-02070: database SF does not support some function in this context"

The customer was trying to update this Salesforce data:

SQL> select "Type" from Account@SF where "Id"='001w000001CKeM8AAL';
Type
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Customer - Channel 2

SQL> update Account@SF set "Type"='Customer - Channel 3' where
"Id"='001w000001CKeM8AAL';
update Account@SF set "Type"='Customer - Channel 3' where
"Id"='001w000001CKeM8AAL'
                                                               *
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-02070: database SF does not support some function in this context

The workaround was to use a pass through SQL statement:

SQL> DECLARE
  2     cr NUMBER;
  3     rs NUMBER;
  4  BEGIN
  5     cr := DBMS_HS_PASSTHROUGH.OPEN_CURSOR@SF;
  6     DBMS_HS_PASSTHROUGH.PARSE@SF(cr,'update Account set "Type"=''Customer - Channel 3'' where "Id"=''001w000001CKeM8AAL'' ');
  7     rs := DBMS_HS_PASSTHROUGH.EXECUTE_NON_QUERY@SF (cr);
  8     DBMS_HS_PASSTHROUGH.CLOSE_CURSOR@SF(cr);
  9  END;
 10  /

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

SQL> select "Type" from Account@SF where "Id"='001w000001CKeM8AAL';

Type
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Customer - Channel 3

SQL>