Read-only Database Access Offering Available In March To Our Blackbaud CRM Azure Public Cloud Hosted Customers

Read-only Database Access Offering Available In March To Our Blackbaud CRM Azure Public Cloud Hosted Customers

Published

We are excited to announce the launch of Read-only Database Access for Blackbaud CRM (Azure hosted only) later this month. We look forward to seeing your success stories as you enable and take advantage of this new capability.

This offering is in response to the challenges you have reported over the years around increasing access to your data. We’ve been listening. Read-only Database Access will enable your organization to:

Connect directly to a real-time, read-only replica of your transactional and warehouse database
Improve performance by running reports and queries against the read-only rather than transactional database
Incorporate modern reporting and data aggregation tools such as Power BI, Azure Data Factory, DataStage, etc.
Connect with SSMS and SSRS
Save time troubleshooting by running investigative queries directly against the read-only database rather than filing tickets with support
Obtain access to database tables not available with the CRM Query tool

Our Client Technology Preview was very successful, with one customer stating:

“Database Read-only Access is absolutely essential and has quickly become the foundation of our reporting development. We continue to be impressed with how fast refreshes are. In a very short time after deployment we were already using it to drive dashboards for fundraisers and executive leadership.”
- Rob Gibbons, Senior Director of Data Analytics, Advancement Services, University of South Carolina

To learn more, please see the user guide and FAQ here.
To begin the journey, reach out to your sales representative or account manager.

News Blackbaud CRM™ and Blackbaud Internet Solutions™ Blog 03/09/2021 3:40pm EST

Added by Pat Conley

3 Comments

Scott Yates Dobble Champion Aug '23

Hi is this service available to NXT or just the CRM product? Thank you

Julia Lenz Mar '21

A note to all that this feature for our Azure Public Cloud clients has now officially launched!

Liz Hackett Mar '21

Very exciting! How will this be different from the Data Warehouses functionality currently in CRM?

Pat Conley Mar '21

It's fundamentally different. Read-only supports a direct real-time SQL connection, so you can use the reporting and querying tool of your choice to run queries and pull information. You can even take queries you've already written in the CRM Query Tool and run those. You can use modern cloud based tools like Azure Data Factory to extract data for incorporation into a central data store.

You can have a read-only real-time connection to your data warehouse as well, enabling use of third party tools to report and extract data directly.

See the user guide and FAQ for more information (linked in original post).