Profile of a Salesforce Data Architect

According to the Salesforce Certified Data Architect Exam Guide (located at https://trailhead.salesforce.com/help?article=Salesforce-Certified-Data-Architecture-and-Management-Designer-Exam-Guide), a Salesforce Data Architect is someone who does the following:

… assesses the architecture environment and requirements and designs sound, scalable, and performant solutions on the Customer 360 Platform as it pertains to enterprise data management. The candidate is knowledgeable about information architecture frameworks covering major building blocks, such as data sourcing, integration/movement, persistence, master data management, metadata management and semantic reconciliation, data governance, security, and delivery. 

The candidate also has experience assessing customers requirements in regards to data quality needs and creating solutions to ensure high-quality data (for example, no duplicates, correct data) and can also recommend organizational changes to ensure proper data stewardship. The candidate has experience communicating solutions and design trade-offs to business stakeholders.

Let's break this definition down a little.

The first paragraph of that definition contained a lot of terms, but ultimately, it describes someone who can understand the requirements and applies data architecture principles and experience when formulating a solution or design. To me, this is part-and-parcel of our day job: understanding requirements and designing solutions. There is also mention of performance, data management, security, scalability, and governance. The second paragraph focuses on data quality and stewardship. All these aspects are covered in this book.

When we turn our attention to what the profile of a Data Architect is, a lot of parallels can be drawn to the humble Salesforce administrator, consultant, or architect – we listen to what our stakeholders want and design solutions that address those requirements, all while being mindful of the considerations and trade-offs that may present themselves along the way.

A Data Architect applies their knowledge of the data architecture of the Salesforce Customer 360 platform, including its features and their impact on the system when producing designs or solutions, such as the following:

• Sharing and security impacts based on the relationship choice between objects
• Large data volume considerations and mitigations
• Knowing what type of object to use where (standard, custom, big, or external)
• Indexing
• Performance
• Data stewardship and governance
• Loading and extracting data from the platform, and the methods available to affect the performance of these

With the definition of the profile of a Salesforce Data Architect broken down a little, we can turn our attention to the learning journey that will be outlined in this book.