Play by Play: Denormalize Your Thinking About Salesforce Data Modeling

Course Overview
Welcome to this Salesforce Play by Play with Pluralsight. Salesforce Play by Play is an interactive series where we sit down with Salesforce experts, such as MVPs, consultants, developers, and architects, to discuss common challenges faced every day by Salesforce customers. We'll be learning while discussing concepts and debating tradeoffs on various approaches to solving real-world problems. We learn by reviewing system configurations or writing code, and then exploring the benefits of any particular solution. In this course, we challenge Mike Topalovich, Salesforce application architect, to explain why it's important for Salesforce customers to understand just how and why data modeling and design in Salesforce is different from traditional database technologies. First, Mike explains the key concepts behind the Salesforce multitenant database, and we discuss why there's a strong need to apply solid data modeling principles and practices to any org's data model. He explains why denormalization is the norm in Salesforce, and why it's important for developers and business analysts new to the platform to unlearn some common normalization patterns. He steps into the fundamentals of Salesforce data design and refactoring, and walks us through basic configuration of objects, fields, and relationships as we review the importance of some data design principles that support the Salesforce no-code model. Along the way, we explore indexes, queries, relationships, joins, and antipatterns, as well as database performance considerations, optimization mechanisms, and some tools tips, and tricks. By the time we're done, you'll have gained a broad perspective on how and why database patterns and practices are different in Salesforce, and some of the trade-offs necessary between performance, user experience, scalability, and security. So, please join us for Denormalize Your Thinking About Salesforce Data. We hope you enjoy it.

Fundamentals of Salesforce Data Model Design
Don, when I approach projects, again, we just had this conversation about how do I sell the value of design and doing things right up front. Sometimes it's a tough sell, because clients just, they're sold on the Salesforce concept that everything is easy, and it's true, it is easy, I can go in and create objects and fields very easily, but when you sit down to design for Salesforce, over the years I've found that there's just some design principles that you keep in mind. Number one, you want to design for user experience. So as a Salesforce user, a salesperson, when I go to look at the opportunity record, I just want to see the fields that are important to me. I just want to enter the data that is important to me understanding what I have to do to close a deal. I've seen way too many instances of Salesforce where you go to look at the opportunity record and it's a mile high, okay, there's 450 custom fields on the account. It hurts, it's painful to look at that screen, so you want to make sure that when you design your data model that you put the right fields in the right place, you can segment objects using something called record types. So if I have different users for the same object I can segment that so that I don't have to create new objects I can just use this record type, and then if I go to create a new record I can see, okay, well here is the type of data that I'll be entering. So user experience, you want to make sure that they have everything they need and they're not clicking all around looking for the information that they need.