Stream data from Workday

The Workday connector in Datastream lets you replicate historical data and incremental updates from a Workday instance for analytics and data integration. Workday is a cloud-based enterprise resource planning platform for financial and human capital management, including recruiting, onboarding, compensation, and time tracking.

When you prepare a Workday source in Datastream, review the replication behavior, supported objects, and known limitations.

Behavior

The Workday connector in Datastream relies on the Workday SOAP API. Because Workday doesn't expose its internal table schema to users, Datastream treats SOAP API endpoints as tables.

Datastream supports two primary replication methods to ensure data integrity and performance: historical backfill and incremental synchronization.

  • Historical backfill: the Workday connector allows for full historical synchronization of all existing records in an endpoint. To ensure consistency across backfill queries, Datastream uses the as_of_entry_date_time parameter. This lets the connector consistently fetch one page of data at a time.

  • Incremental synchronization: the incremental synchronization method captures changes, such as inserts and updates, that occur after the initial backfill. Datastream uses server-side incremental synchronization by selecting endpoints that support transaction logs. These logs enable the connector to filter queries by the updated_through field, which only selects records that have been updated since a specific date.

Supported objects

The Workday connector leverages a dynamic discovery mechanism to identify the entire set of objects within an instance. The connector fetches the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) files corresponding to each SOAP API service.

For each endpoint in each service, the connector uses the WSDL file to determine whether the endpoint supports transaction logs.

The following table lists the objects that Datastream supports and their replication types:

Object Replication type
Financial_Management_Organizations Backfill, incremental sync
Human_Resources_Job_Profiles Backfill, incremental sync
Human_Resources_Organizations Backfill, incremental sync
Human_Resources_Workers Backfill, incremental sync
Recruiting_Candidates Backfill, incremental sync
Recruiting_Evergreen_Requisitions Backfill, incremental sync
Recruiting_Job_Requisitions Backfill, incremental sync
Recruiting_Organizations Backfill, incremental sync
Recruiting_Positions Backfill, incremental sync
Staffing_Organizations Backfill, incremental sync
Staffing_Positions Backfill, incremental sync
Staffing_Workers Backfill, incremental sync

Known limitations

Known limitations for using Workday as a source include:

  • Datastream doesn't support replicating delete events.
  • Datastream doesn't replicate events fetched from endpoints that don't support transaction logs.

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