Data Migration Under Salesforce

What Are The Best Practices For Data Migration Under Salesforce?

By Read Dive 4 years ago
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When your customer chooses to shift to a new platform, you need to migrate all of the legacy system’s functional data. This process is a complex one that needs to be done right. With the help of Salesforce, you can get the benefits of seamless data migration thanks to its unique process. Irrespective of the particular nature of data migration, the final goal is to boost corporate function and performance to attain a competitive advantage.

Data migration with Salesforce is the first thing a business needs to do before they go live. This enables them to seamlessly carry forward all the present data from the legacy system into Salesforce without the fear of loss. You can implement it without any hassles.

No room for mistakes and data loss during the migration process

Experts in the field of data migration state it is a one-time task. When the data ultimately gets loaded in Salesforce.org, your data migration is complete. This is why you need to avoid even the slightest mistake that would cascade into doing the whole process from the beginning again. Moreover, the process must be done with zero error so that the customer’s sensitive data is not jeopardized in any way.

To avert any issue in the data migration process, the following best practices should be taken into consideration for the task-

1. Identify the fields required

In the first step, you need to enlist the fields you want to be involved in data migration. They should be-

  • Required fields
  • Optional fields
  • Fields that are generated by the system

Once you have identified the fields to be listed, the next step is to identify any extra fields that you need for the process. They can be-

  • Legacy IDs
  • Business rules

2. Regulate the order of the data migration

Note, in Salesforce, the relationship between dependencies and objects will dictate your order of data migration. For example, all the accounts have an owner, and the opportunities are linked with the account. In the above case, the order is to-.

  • Load the accounts
  • Load the opportunities

The relationships here are expressed via the related lists and lookups in the Salesforce application where the IDs or the foreign key established relationships in the database.

3. Workbook for Data Migration

Here you should create and follow a workbook for the migration through its scope. This should be a consolidated workbook containing the data mapping for every object in the process. There should be one template with many tabs (one for every data mapping object) with a checklist for data migration and its storage requirements. This workbook can be customized based on the requirements of the business.

Leading specialists from Flosum, an esteemed name in the field of SalesforceDevOps, you should consider the following before pre-data migration-

  • Create and establish a user with a system admin profile for the data migration process
  • Complete the configuration of the system
  • Create the profiles/roles
  • Make sure to store all the potential legacy IDs for a specific record under Salesforce (this will help you to troubleshoot in the future)
  • Ensure that the values of the picklist and the types of records are defined.
  • Set up each currency/product combination in the price books if it still will be deployed in Salesforce. ( this needs to be first loaded onto the standard price book)
  • You need to define the proper data mapping.

4. Considerations for data load

The following are the considerations you need to consider for data loads-

  • Clean and optimize the data before you load it. It is a healthy practice to standardize, clean, then de-dupe, and later validate the source data before the migration process
  • You must use bulk API for improved throughput, especially when you need to work with large volumes of data to increase the data load’s speed.
  • You must disable and defer whatever you can. When the data is clean, it is prudent to safely disable the processes you regularly have set for protecting errors in data entry for batch loads and those made by users during their daily tasks. All of the above operations will add substantial time to your inserts, especially complex triggers. They are the first things you must investigate when you are debugging a slow load.
  • When you load large volumes of data, their calculations generally take a lot of time. The load performance can be made better by deferring its sharing calculations until the load is completed.

Besides the above best practices, the following are some extra rules that you may consider for data migration under Salesforce-

  • The scope of the project must be precisely defined
  • The process builder should be aware of the format of the source and target (Salesforce) requirements for data format
  • The process for data migration should have the ability to detect both successful and failed records. The general approach here is to have an additional column located in the source table to store the target table’s unique ID. In this way, there are lesser records that fail after your first iteration, where the process is re-executed. This will only choose the records that have failed and are not migrated fully.
  • Refine the project scope via targeted auditing and profiling actively
  • Reduce the data amount that is to be migrated
  • Profile and later audit all of the source data in the scope before the mapping specifications are written.
  • Define a budget and timeline that is realistic with the knowledge of issues in the data
  • Goal to test all the data present in the scope as soon as possible at its unit levels.

Therefore, when it comes to data migration under Salesforce, the above are the best practices that one can follow. With them, one can ensure a large volume of data being successfully migrated through Salesforce without hassles!

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