Best practices for Data Loading in Salesforce

Data loading is a very common requirement in most of the salesforce projects. We need to load many master data and transactional data in production based on requirements that include thousands of records. In this article, I am going to list some best practices that we can follow and keep in mind while loading data in production.

1.    Organization-Wide Sharing defaults -

While loading data in production, if objects have ‘Private’ OWD then it does additional processing in the background. Therefore, it is better to load data using read/write OWD and change it to ‘private’ after cutover.

2.    Workflow rules, validation rules, and triggers -

If these tools are enabled in your production org while loading data, it can give many errors and it may slow down the process. Therefore, it is recommended to disable these tools before loading data.

 3.    Bulk API Vs. SOAP API -

SOAP API is useful for small data sets where complex processing is required, but it is time-consuming for large data sets. Bulk API is designed to process from thousands to millions of records. It is based on REST principles and makes data loading faster.

4.    Pre-Processing data for production -

It is important to invest time in data analyzing and preparing before cutover activities. If we are disabling workflow rules/validation rules/ triggers for data load, we need to make sure the data we are loading is correct and meeting the criteria of automated tools mentioned above. We may need to query data and use excel functionality to make sure data is correct.

5.    Use custom setting to disable triggers -

If you have numbers of triggers in org then it is difficult to disable and enable each one of them, also sometimes we may forget to enable a few triggers after data load. Therefore, as a best practice, we can create a checkbox field in a custom setting to decide if triggers should run, and we need to add this flag in each trigger.

6.    Post-activity -

Once data loading is completed make sure you perform all required activities, some examples are below –

·       Enable custom setting for triggers.

·       Enable workflow rules / validation rules / process builders.

·       Change OWD to private if needed.

·       Update existing record with bulk API / Batch jobs if needed.

While performing activities to speed up data processing, keep below points in mind.

 ·     Parent record for Master-detail relationships – you need to make sure parent records are loaded before child records.

·       Record owners should exist in org before loading data.

·      Make sure owners have correct role hierarchy assigned to do processing of data while loading.