Is there a way to access an external database using the force.com platform?

My organization wants to be able to regularly read in data from an external web service which provides an ODBC interface, and update our salesforce data with that information. I've been hunting around Salesforce's documentation, and it seems like there's no way to do this except by using the Apex Data Loader's batch functionality. Unfortunately, this means that my organization would have to maintain a local computer to run the data loader nightly, which we're trying to avoid doing.

What we'd like to do is create an Apex开发者_运维百科 Schedulable class or something similar and run code that can access the ODBC interface from our external data source on the salesforce platform itself. Is it possible to do this?

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There's no support for making outbound ODBC connections from salesforce. If the external service has an HTTP based API, then you use the http client in apex to make the api calls and get the data.

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Outbound as mentioned you'd have to make wrap your database in a webservice. You could load the data in using data loader/Talend/Informatica/etc.