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

Pat Conley
Pat Conley Blackbaud Employee
Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Participant Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud CRM™ and Blackbaud Internet Solutions™ Blog
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.

Comments

  • Liz Hackett
    Liz Hackett
    Eighth Anniversary Kudos 3 2025 bbcon Attendee Badge Blackbaud CRM Fall 2025 Product Update Briefing Badge
    Very exciting! How will this be different from the Data Warehouses functionality currently in CRM?
  • Pat Conley
    Pat Conley Blackbaud Employee
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Participant Facilitator 1
    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).
  • Julia Lenz
    Julia Lenz
    Tenth Anniversary Participant Facilitator 1
    A note to all that this feature for our Azure Public Cloud clients has now officially launched!
  • Scott Yates Dobble Champion
    Scott Yates Dobble Champion
    Fifth Anniversary Facilitator 1

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

Categories