Recently I passed the Salesforce Certified Data Architecture and Management Designer Certification. This certification is on the Architect Path and an interesting one as it’s not only focused on Sales Force product suite but tests overall understanding of system integration and best practices.
In this blog, I wanted to share my experience and preparation strategy. As blog posts and experience of others who have passed the certification really helped me prepare.
What Did I study?
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SalesForce TrailHead
SalesForce Trail Head architect-data-architecture-and-management
This is an excellent place to start, one note I spent a lot of time going through the videos, which were enlightening and helps in getting a general understanding but from an exam specific perspective, you may not need to go through them in entirety.
- Useful Blogs:
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Quizlet :
https://quizlet.com/179198495/salesforce-data-architecture-and-management-designer-flash-cards/
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Resource Guide
resource guides. Specifically the use cases after page 16.
Surprises
I did not expect so much focus on the relationship between objects. These are basic but you need to be very clear on object relationships, Lookup,master-detail, External Id, when to use them, How they behave in terms of record access, record deletion.
I spent a lot of time focusing on the numbers, Rolling limits, SOQL query limits, Batch Job limits, index selection criteria 30 percent for the first million, There were not many actually I think none 🙂 .
Parting Notes
Apart from all the good materials that are already available if I have to highlight top 5 focus area they would be
1.Data Migration considering MDM and Storage needs
2.Field Level Audit Trail and Event Monitoring
3.System Performance for reporting and snapshots
4.Object Relationship and Data Model Design Techniques
5. And surprisingly Time Management-I finished the exam 15 minutes early and did not get a chance to review all my answers.
SFDC4Life 