Preparing for Data Architecture and Management exam Salesforce

As I prepare for the Data Architecture exam, I have compiled a list of topics that I've encountered but do not frequently come across in my day-to-day work. These notes are not intended to be a comprehensive guide for exam preparation.

For comprehensive exam preparation, I recommend checking out the official Salesforce trail for guided learning. This trail covers most of the topics needed for the exam and provides a practical understanding of Salesforce technologies.

Architect Journey: Data Architecture

Salesforce Connect

oData, External objects, limits on external objects. Below blog covers this topic with simple explanation. Salesforce Connect - Integration, Benefits & Limitations

Salesforce to Salesforce

Salesforce to Salesforce is a feature that allows you to share data with another salesforce.com Organization. It is multi tenant platform where every customer will have their own environment in a shared platform. It is used to share records between two partner or organizations in salesforce.

PK Chunking with Bulk API

It's important to know when to utilize the Bulk API and its various options, such as Serial mode, Parallel mode, and PK chunking. Understanding these options can lead to faster API calls with a higher chance of success. Although I was already familiar with these options and did not need to investigate further, I encourage you to research these options online to gain a better understanding. In particular, PK chunking is explained in greater detail here and is worth exploring to optimize Bulk API performance.

Big Objects

Read about big objects here

License types and usage

Specifically new once I didn't knew about, lightning platform Start, lightning platform plus.

FOR UPDATE usage for locking records

Classic Encryption vs Shield Platform Encryption 

With Shield Platform Encryption, you can encrypt a variety of widely used standard fields, along with some custom fields and many kinds of files. Shield Platform Encryption also supports person accounts, cases, search, approval processes, and other key Salesforce features. Classic encryption lets you protect only a special type of custom text field, which you create for that purpose.

data management policies 

Salesforce data classification gives you four fields to categorize and classify data in your Org: Compliance Categorization, Data Owner, Field Usage and Data Sensitivity Level. Here's a look at what each of these mean. 

  1. Data Sensitivity

The first question you'll want to ask about a field is 'how sensitive is it?' Who should be able to see it? Who should be able to edit it? Salesforce gives you several default values for this classification:

  • Public: available to the public to view but not alter
  • Internal: available to company employees and contractors; must not be shared publicly, but can be shared with customers, partners and others under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA)
  • Confidential: available to an approved group of employees and contractors; not restricted by law, regulation or a master service agreement (MSA), and can be shared with customers, partners and others under an NDA
  • Restricted: available only to an approved group of employees and contractors; likely restricted by law, regulation, an NDA or MSA
  • MissionCritical: available only to a small group of approved employees and contractors; third parties who are given access could be subject to heightened contractual requirements, and  almost always restricted by law, regulation or an NDA/MSA

Compliance Categorization

Highly sensitive data may be subject to regulatory scrutiny; the Compliance Categorization field gives you a way to identify data with special privacy requirements that will require additional security controls. Out of the box, Salesforce comes with data classification tabs for the following regulatory standards:

  • CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act)
  • COPPA: (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act)
  • GDPR: (General Data Protection Regulation)
  • HIPAA: (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)
  • PCI: (Payment Card Industry)
  • PII: (Personally Identifiable Information)

Organizations in highly regulated industries — healthcare, life sciences and finance are three common examples — can benefit from using these fields to identify and track data that will be of concern to auditors. 

Data Owner

This classification specifies the group or person associated with the field — ie. the person who can answer the questions, 'Is this important?' and 'Can I change this?' As a result, the data owner should be someone who understands the importance of the field’s data to your company; they will likely also be responsible for determining the minimum data sensitivity level and any relevant controls around it.

Field Usage

Finally the Field Usage classification tracks whether the field is in use, which can be useful when conducting a clean up project. The available categories include:

  • Active: In use and visible
  • DeprecateCandidate: Planned for deprecation and no longer in use
  • Hidden: Not visible and possibly planned for deprecation — use with caution

Skinny tables

Apex hours has a good explanation of skinny tables. Below pointers are important.

For each object table that’s visible to you, Salesforce maintains other, separate tables at the database level for standard and custom fields. This separation, which is invisible to customers, ordinarily requires a join when a query contains both kinds of fields. A skinny table contains both kinds of fields and also omits soft-deleted records

  1. They avoid resource intensive joins
  2. Their tables are kept in sync with their source tables when source tables are modified
  3. They do not include soft deleted records
  4. Skinny help improve report and query performance in following ways-:
    1. Skinny tables provide a view across multiple objects for easy access to combined data
    2. Skinny tables contain frequently used fields and thereby help avoiding joins
    3. Skinny tables are kept in sync with changes to data in source tables

Below topics are which we all are aware of, if working in salesforce domain since these are used in day to day work.

  1. Usage of Custom metadata type...

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