In today's data-driven world, moving massive amounts of data into a CRM can be a real challenge, especially when you're dealing with millions of records or even more. Many APIs have strict rate limits that can lead to throttling, timeouts, and other frustrating errors. Consider a common scenario: you need to migrate millions of customer records from a client's local database into Zoho CRM. Using standard API calls for such a large volume would almost certainly result in low throughput and performance issues.
Fortunately, Zoho CRM offers a powerful Bulk API for handling large-scale data operations like Insert, Update, or Upsert. Compared to traditional API calls, the Bulk API offers several key advantages:
- It supports a much larger batch size, consuming fewer API requests overall.
- You are far less likely to hit API rate limits when working with large datasets.
- The bulk jobs run asynchronously, freeing up your resources and reducing the likelihood of timeout errors.
With all the benefits in mind, it is, however, not something that you can directly operate to achieve these bulk data imports within the Zoho CRM user interface. This is where the SSIS Productivity Pack solution can come in to help simplify the process. Our Zoho CRM REST components, part of the SSIS Productivity Pack, handle the heavy lifting behind the scenes. In this post, we’ll show you how to leverage them for efficient, high-volume data loads.
The solution involves a few key KingswaySoft components:
- Data Spawner: Serves as a data generator for this demonstration. In a real-world scenario, you would replace this with your actual data source.
- REST Connection Manager: Establishes the connection to your Zoho CRM environment.
- REST Destination: Manages the process of loading data into your Zoho instance using the Bulk API.
- Dummy Destination: A placeholder component that illustrates where to send those successful or failed records from the REST Destination's outputs. In your project, this could be replaced by a database-related destination component that writes to a database table to log errors or another downstream service.
Since all these components are included in our SSIS Productivity Pack, you can easily follow along the procedure described below in your own Integration Services project.
SSIS Package Design
The SSIS data flow design for this task is straightforward. In our example, we're generating 100,000 contact records using the Data Spawner. It is worth mentioning that 100,000 is not necessarily a large volume per se. We start with such a number for demonstration purposes. In the data flow, the heavy lifting is done in the REST Destination component, which is configured to send data to Zoho CRM leveraging the Zoho CRM Bulk API capabilities. As you can see, we've also included two Dummy Destination components to illustrate how we can handle successful records and error rows separately.
Configuring the REST Destination for Bulk API Loads
The magic happens within the REST Destination component. After selecting your Zoho CRM connection and the target Destination Object (e.g., Contacts), you can choose one of the available bulk actions. For this example, we're using Bulk Upsert. This particular action allows you to insert new records and updates existing ones with a single operation, using a designated field to check for duplicates in order to determine the final action, whether it should be an insert or an update. Having said that, there are also the Bulk Insert or Bulk Update options available in the destination component if your logic requires separate flows.
Notice the default batch size is significantly larger than what's allowed in standard API calls, with a maximum of 25,000 records per batch. This setting determines how our component chunks the data before sending it to Zoho. The entire operation runs as a single job, but each chunk is uploaded and processed as a separate file within that job.
The bulk upsert action requires you to specify a Duplicate Check Field, which is used to determine whether it is a new record that should be inserted or an existing one that needs to be updated. We are using the `Email` field, as it is common that each contact should have a unique email address.
It's also important to be aware of Zoho's file size limit, which is 25 MB per zipped file. You don't need to worry about managing this manually; our component automatically sends the current batch if the file size approaches this limit, ensuring compliance without any extra configuration.
What Happens Behind the Scenes?
Our components manage the entire multi-step Bulk API process internally. First, the component processes your data by adding them into a CSV file before saving them in compressed format (zip). Our component automatically handles file chunking according to your batch size setting. Once the chunk is full, the component will then upload these files and submit it to Zoho CRM application to create a bulk job there, which will then be processed by Zoho CRM application asynchronously. From that point on, our component periodically polls Zoho's API to check the job status. The Job Interval Rate setting controls the frequency of these status checks, but does not impact the actual data processing speed. Once the job is complete, the component automatically downloads the results file from Zoho.
During processing, a status check will likely show the job as IN PROGRESS.
When the job status changes to COMPLETED, the process is finished. The results file downloaded by our component contains information only for records that failed during the operation. As shown in our data flow, these error rows can be redirected from the error output to another destination, such as a logging table, for further analysis or reprocessing.
Conclusion
By following these steps, you can harness the power of the Zoho CRM Bulk API for high-volume data integrations without the complexity. Whether you're performing a large-scale data migration, a periodic sync, or an initial mass update, this approach dramatically reduces load times and improves reliability compared to traditional methods.
With KingswaySoft, you can set up your integrations quickly and start bulk loading data into Zoho CRM right away. By enabling faster loading, minimizing timeouts, and handling larger volumes in fewer calls, your integrations become more efficient, reliable, and scalable. We hope this guide has been helpful!