Now we will talk about the Salesforce data model. Understanding the Salesforce data model is very crucial in order to appreciate the synergies Salesforce gets when it shares the same data model among its products. This makes the Salesforce platform very powerful across different business use cases.
The data model refers to the way Salesforce stores and retrieves data. It also refers to the type of relationships you can create in the data. As already mentioned earlier, Salesforce stores data in the form of objects. Objects are like tables, where fields refer to the columns in a table and a record refers to a row of data. Let us discuss them in more detail.
All the business data is stored as objects. There are five types of objects in Salesforce namely standard objects, custom objects, external objects, platform events, and big objects. The three important ones to know are the first three in that list.
- Standard Objects: Objects that are part of the default Salesforce package are called standard objects. They come preinstalled when you subscribe to a Salesforce product. For example, Accounts, Contact, Opportunities, Cases, Products, and so on are all standard objects. Standard objects are created based on the research Salesforce has done in understanding and standardizing business processes. Almost all Salesforce customers use standard objects like Accounts to hold customer information, Opportunities to hold potential deals information, Contact to hold customer contacts information, and so on.
- Custom Objects: Custom objects, as the name suggests, are created by businesses to store information specific to their own business use case. Every business is different, and no two businesses, even in the same industry, will have the same objects. Therefore, in Salesforce, you can create your own custom objects. For example, you can create a custom object named property to store information about properties.
- External Objects: External objects are similar to custom objects except they are used to store data that is outside Salesforce. You can have data outside Salesforce but you can refer to that data inside Salesforce via external objects.
You can create relationships between objects in order to relate one object to another. The following types of relationships are available in Salesforce:
- Master-Detail Relationships: This is the type of relationship where one object acts as the parent (Master) of another object. We create a master-detail relationship between two or more objects when one object depends on another and cannot exist without the master. The detail object gets its properties, including security settings from the master object. For example, for every contact record, you need an account record. A contact cannot exist with an account. So Account is the master and Contact is the detail object. There are many details about master-detail relationships, but we won’t be covering that in this book. To know more about this type of relationship between objects, you can refer to the Salesforce documentation.
- Look-up Relationship: If there cannot be a master-detail relationship, that is, one can exist independently without the other, then you can create a look-up relationship if you want to access one object’s data on another object. Through a lookup relationship, you create a lookup field using which you can access any field on the other object. Lookup relationships can be one-to-one or one-to-many.
Figure 1.15: Salesforce Data model example (Source: https://architect.salesforce.com/diagrams/template-gallery/sales-cloud-overview-data-model)
An example of a typical Sales cloud data model can be seen in Figure 1.15. Using the legend, you can infer that several different types of relationships are created. This is how a Salesforce architect will design the data model before they start creating objects and fields in Salesforce.