Reusing Your Data
Turn Your Salesforce Backup into a Strategic Data Asset
GRAX doesn't just protect your Salesforce data—it transforms it into a queryable, analyzable data product that powers modern analytics, AI, and business intelligence across your organization.
Why Reuse Your Salesforce Data?
Complete Historical Context
GRAX captures comprehensive Salesforce data history from day one of your backup—including field changes, deletions, and record evolution that Salesforce's native tools don't preserve. Unlike Salesforce's 90-day field history tracking or limited Data Cloud retention, GRAX gives you:
Years of historical depth: Track trends across quarters and years, not just days
Deleted record access: Query records removed from Salesforce production
Point-in-time analysis: See what your data looked like on any historical date
Complete audit trails: Field-level change history for compliance and investigation
Training datasets: Rich historical data for AI/ML model development
Data You Actually Own
Your data lives in your cloud storage (AWS S3, Azure Blob, or GCP Cloud Storage), not locked in a vendor platform. This means:
No API limits: Query as much as you need without throttling
No per-query costs: Beyond standard cloud storage fees
Your tools, your choice: Use any analytics platform, warehouse, or BI tool
Data sovereignty: Full control over data residency and governance
Cloud-agnostic: Works with AWS, Azure, or GCP
Enterprise-Proven Scale
Fortune 100 companies trust GRAX to handle their mission-critical Salesforce data at massive scale—processing hundreds of millions of record versions per week in production environments. Whether you're analyzing millions of records or building real-time dashboards, GRAX handles enterprise-scale workloads with sub-2-hour latency for operational analytics.
How GRAX Fits Your Data Architecture
GRAX provides the Bronze layer. Your complete Salesforce history as Parquet files in your cloud storage (S3, Azure Blob, GCS). From there, customers take different approaches:
Direct Query (Serverless)
Query Bronze directly with minimal transformation. Cost-effective for analytics workloads.
AWS: Athena, Glue external tables
GCP: BigQuery external tables
Azure: Synapse serverless pools
Local/Open Source: DuckDB for cost-free analytics on your laptop or server
Data Lakehouse Platform
Unified analytics and data engineering on Bronze.
Databricks (medallion architecture)
Azure Synapse Analytics
AWS EMR + Spark
Traditional Warehouse
Transform and load into a data warehouse for BI.
Transform: dbt, Airflow, Cloud Dataflow, custom SQL
Warehouse: Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery
BI: Tableau, Looker, Power BI, QuickSight
Many customers use combinations of these approaches—for example, running Athena for ad-hoc queries while maintaining Snowflake for production dashboards.
The key: GRAX doesn't lock you into any approach. The open Parquet format means you can start simple and evolve as needs change.
Choose Your Path
The right integration approach depends on your team's capabilities and goals:
Query historical data with SQL Build BI dashboards, run analytics, or feed data warehouses
Data Lake Automatic Parquet export to your cloud storage
Data analysts BI teams Data engineers
Find and investigate records Search historical data, explore relationships, audit changes
Global Search Full-text search across all GRAX data
Salesforce admins Support teams Compliance officers
Recover deleted data Restore records with full relationships back to Salesforce
Global Search Find, Review, Restore workflow
Admins Data recovery teams Support staff
Seed developer sandboxes Copy production data (anonymized) into dev/test environments
Sandbox Seeding On-demand data copying with anonymization
Developers QA teams Training admins
Build custom integrations Automate workflows or integrate with internal tools
Public API OpenAPI REST interface for programmatic access
Developers Integration engineers Automation teams
Access GRAX from Salesforce UI View history, search, or restore without leaving SFDC
Managed Package Lightning components embedded in Salesforce
End users Salesforce admins Support agents
Core Capabilities
Data Lake: SQL Analytics Foundation
Automatically exports backup data to Parquet format for high-performance analytics.
What you get:
Cloud-native Parquet files in your S3/Azure/GCP storage
Historical depth with all record versions over time
Works with AWS Athena, Azure Synapse, Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery
Sub-2-hour latency for operational analytics
Continuous incremental updates (no batch dumps)
Perfect for:
BI dashboards without Salesforce API limits
Data warehouse loading (Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift)
Historical trend analysis and forecasting
Machine learning training datasets
Cross-system analytics (join with ERP, marketing, etc.)
Architecture fit: Your Bronze layer for downstream transformations
Global Search: Find Anything, Anytime
Full-text search and investigation across all GRAX historical data.
What you get:
Search by any field value, date range, or text content
View complete record history and change timeline
Relationship graph visualization
Export results or restore to Salesforce
Template-based searches for common patterns
Perfect for:
Finding deleted records for recovery
Investigating data quality issues
Compliance audits and field-level change tracking
Training users on historical scenarios
Root cause analysis of data problems
Architecture fit: Interactive investigation and recovery tool
Sandbox Seeding: Production Data for Development
Copy production data into sandboxes with relationship preservation and optional anonymization.
What you get:
Select records via Salesforce reports, SOQL, CSV, or Global Search
Automatic relationship graph building (parent/child records)
Deterministic or random data anonymization
Full control over object inclusion and field overrides
Faster than Salesforce's sandbox refresh cycle
Perfect for:
Giving developers realistic test data
QA testing against production scenarios
Training environments with anonymized data
On-demand sandbox refreshes (not quarterly waits)
Testing complex integrations with real data shapes
Architecture fit: Development enablement and testing
Public API: Programmatic Access
OpenAPI-based REST interface for custom integrations and automation.
What you get:
RESTful endpoints for search, backup, restore, and metadata operations
Full OpenAPI specification at
/api/spec/grax.jsonToken-based authentication with scoped permissions
Webhook support for event-driven workflows (where available)
Rate limits appropriate for enterprise workloads
Perfect for:
Building custom applications on GRAX data
Automating compliance and governance workflows
Real-time data sync to operational systems
Integration with internal tools and platforms
Scheduled reporting and alerting
Architecture fit: Programmatic integration layer
Managed Package: In-Salesforce Access
Lightning components that embed GRAX functionality directly in Salesforce UI.
What you get:
Search component for finding historical records
Record detail components showing change history
Restore wizards integrated into page layouts
Template-based search for common patterns
Auto-updates via managed package releases
Perfect for:
End users who never leave Salesforce
Support teams needing quick record recovery
Admins managing user access to GRAX features
Zero-training adoption (familiar Salesforce UI)
Governance via Salesforce permission sets
Architecture fit: User-facing access layer
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