{"id":110695,"date":"2016-04-28T05:56:39","date_gmt":"2016-04-28T12:56:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/power-platform\/blog\/power-automate\/where-twitter-meets-sql\/"},"modified":"2025-06-11T08:18:51","modified_gmt":"2025-06-11T15:18:51","slug":"where-twitter-meets-sql","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/power-platform\/blog\/power-automate\/where-twitter-meets-sql\/","title":{"rendered":"Where twitter meets SQL"},"content":{"rendered":"
I am Barath Balasubramanian, the extensibility program manager in the Microsoft Flow team. If you would like to explore integration opportunities with Microsoft Flow, ranging from providing a simple #HREF link to flow.microsoft.com from your application to being able to use the full CRUD\/manage operations on Flows via REST APIs from within your application, I am your man. This blog post is for\u00a0an advanced user<\/strong> scenario of connecting to a SQL server by creating a flow from scratch. Make sure you read the getting started blog here<\/a> first.<\/strong><\/p>\n Today, I am going to walk you through creating a Flow that will capture tweets, every time a specific #hashtag is tweeted, we then add an entry into a SQL server table with that tweet information. This is a powerful scenario when\u00a0compared to posting a message on Slack or Yammer when a tweet arrives\u00a0because having this data in SQL lets you mine the data at a later time for market sentiment about the #hashtag you care about most.<\/p>\n Here are the simple steps to get this going<\/p>\n 1. Go to https:\/\/flow.microsoft.com and select My flows<\/p>\n 2. Select create new flow button<\/p>\n 3. Add a trigger for when a new tweet appears<\/p>\n 4. Sign in to Twitter<\/p>\n 5. Add a #hashtag string e.g. #Azure. Create a connection to Twitter<\/p>\n 6. Add an action for Insert row into a SQL Server. Learn how to quickly\u00a0get started with SQL Azure databases here<\/a>.<\/p>\n 7. Setup the SQL connection with a connection string like this \u2013 “Server=contoso.database.net;Database=db_name;User Id=db_user;Password=db_pass;”<\/em><\/p>\n 8. Select the table you setup on the SQL server and link values from the tweet to the appropriate column on the SQL table<\/p>\n 9. Give a name to the Flow and click Create Flow<\/p>\n 10. Once saved, you will enter the testing experience. The UI waits until the trigger event happens. Tweet with the\u00a0#Azure hashtag or\u00a0wait for a tweet to happen, when it happens,\u00a0you will see the run result right away.<\/p>\n That\u2019s it! It is real! You have really created a complex task of inserting a new record into a SQL table, every time someone tweets a #hashtag. Neither did you have to write complex web service code against Twitter developer APIs, nor did you have to create a complex connection to a SQL server with an intermediate API layer between your client and the SQL server. Since I created the Flow for this blog post, I converted it into a template, so can quickly get started with this template<\/a>. With Microsoft flow, business users can really change the way things are done at a workplace.<\/p>\n Next Steps:<\/p>\n
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