Agents
DLH.io agents are small, customer-installed programs that extract data from systems that live behind your firewall and deliver it to your data lake or data warehouse.
Most DLH.io connectors run inside the DLH.io platform and reach your source system over the internet. An agent is the opposite pattern: a lightweight program that you install next to the source system (on-premises, in a private cloud, or on a locked-down VM), that extracts the data locally and pushes it outward to your object storage and downstream warehouse.
Use an agent when:
- The source database is not reachable from the internet and you do not want to open inbound firewall rules or maintain an SSH tunnel.
- Compliance requires that extraction runs inside your network and that credentials never leave your environment.
- You need high frequency, low latency syncs (for example every 5 minutes) driven by SQL Server Change Tracking or Change Data Capture.
- You want open table formats (Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg) written directly to your own storage account so that Snowflake, Databricks, Trino, DuckDB and other engines can read the same data.
Available agents
| Agent | Source systems | Output | Documentation |
|---|---|---|---|
| SQL Server Agent | Microsoft SQL Server (on-premises, virtual machines or hosted instances reachable over TCP) | CSV, Parquet, Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg to Amazon S3 or Azure Blob / ADLS Gen2 | SQL Server Agent |
| Aloha POS Agent | NCR Aloha POS configuration centers and stores | Daily, hourly and near real-time order data | Aloha POS Agent |
How agents fit with the DLH.io platform
Agents are licensed and monitored through your DLH.io account:
- You create a source connection in the DLH.io portal exactly as you would for a hosted connector. This gives the agent its organization, project and connection identifiers.
- The agent authenticates to the DLH.io platform with an API key on every run. The platform returns your account tier and, for Customer and Trial accounts, short-lived credentials for the object storage that your connection is configured to use.
- The agent extracts data, writes it to storage, and reports the run outcome back to the platform so that run history, missed-run detection and alerting work from the DLH.io portal.
- Downstream, the data is available to your DLH.io target connection, Sync Bridge pipelines and warehouse.
Plans and tiers
Agents run in one of three tiers that are resolved from your API key on each run: Customer, Trial and Community. Community mode runs locally only, caps extraction per table and disables cloud uploads. See the SQL Server Agent overview for details, or contact us to start a trial.
Where to go next
- New to the SQL Server Agent: start with Getting started.
- Already running the agent: see the Configuration reference, the CLI reference and Operations.
- Upgrading: read the SQL Server Agent changelog for what changed between versions.