Grow past 100 Million Records in your Salesforce Database by Following these 6 Steps

In early 2017, Salesforce Client Success reached out to TDigital to review and correct the severely degraded data performance of one of their premier clients. The diagnosis was immediate: a database growing exponentially toward 100 million records, with processes so cumbersome that the team had resorted to exporting data off the platform each night, manipulating it externally, and reimporting it the following day. The most painful swivel-chair process imaginable, and it was consuming their organization.

The scope of the problem.

At the time of our engagement, the client had approximately 35 million records. They were on a trajectory to exceed 100 million before the end of the year. A single data-set turnaround was taking nearly a week: queries ran overnight in batch mode, results were exported, manipulated outside the platform, and then reimported. Their frustration was palpable, and their confidence in the platform was deteriorating rapidly.

Salesforce invited TDigital in because of our track record in solving exactly these kinds of insidious, deeply embedded data access problems within enterprise orgs. When we met with the client team in early April, the issues surfaced quickly.

Over the following weeks, TDigital developed six concrete tactics to consolidate the client’s workflows entirely inside of Salesforce. The result: a process that had been taking nearly a week was brought down to minutes.

A process that took nearly a week was brought down to minutes. Here is how.

The six tactics, presented at Dreamforce 2017.

TDigital Chief Technical Architect Moyez Thanawalla presented these six tactics live at the 2017 Dreamforce Developer Zone. The full session is available below.

Why this matters for your org today.

Large data volume challenges do not announce themselves in advance. They accumulate quietly until a process that once ran in seconds begins taking hours, and a workflow that once took hours begins taking days. By the time an organization feels the full weight of the problem, the cost of correction is significantly higher than it would have been at the first warning sign.

The tactics that resolved this client’s crisis in 2017 remain directly applicable to enterprise orgs today. Broken indexes, data duplication, and off-platform workarounds are not legacy problems. They are present in more organizations than most leaders realize, and they are entirely solvable from within Salesforce when approached with the right architecture and the right methodology.