Salesforce Certified Platform Data Architect Exam Questions

About the Salesforce Certified Platform Data Architect Exam

The Salesforce Certified Platform Data Architect certification validates your ability to design scalable, high-performing data solutions on the Customer 360 Platform. This exam measures your skills in analyzing architecture requirements, managing large data volumes, and ensuring secure, reliable, and high-quality data.

Key areas covered include:

• Data modeling and database design

• Master data management and Salesforce data management

• Data governance and stewardship

• Large data volume considerations and migrations

• Communicating design choices and trade-offs to stakeholders

Who Should Take This Certification

The Salesforce Platform Data Architect certification is for professionals who work with enterprise data and want to demonstrate their ability to design and manage complex Salesforce data solutions. Candidates typically have:

• 2–3 years of Salesforce experience

• 5+ years working with data-driven solutions

Common job roles include:

• Salesforce Data Architect

• Solution/Technical Architect

• Advanced Administrator

• Advanced Platform Developer

Knowledge and Skills Assessed

Successful candidates are expected to be familiar with:

• Data modeling, database design, and Salesforce object relationships

• Data management best practices for Sales Cloud and Service Cloud

• Working with standard objects, big objects, indexing, and performance optimization

• Large data volume (LDV) migration strategies

• Declarative and programmatic tools such as Data Loader and ETL platforms

• Data governance, stewardship, and data quality practices

You are not expected to have knowledge of:

• Non-Salesforce databases or programming languages

• Integration tool configuration

• Master Data Management (MDM) tools

• Lightning development expertise

Exam Details

• Format: 60 multiple-choice/multiple-select questions (+5 unscored)

• Duration: 105 minutes

• Passing score: 58%

• Exam version: Spring ’23 release

• Registration fee: $400 USD (plus taxes, where applicable)

• Retake fee: $200 USD (plus taxes, where applicable)

• Delivery: Onsite proctored or online proctored exam

• Prerequisite: None

The Salesforce Certified Platform Data Architect Exam measures a candidate’s knowledge and skills related to the following objectives.

Data Modeling/Database Design: 25%

• Compare and contrast various techniques and considerations for designing a data model for the Customer 360 Platform. (for example, objects, fields & relationships, object features).

• Given a scenario, recommend approaches and techniques to design a scalable data model that obeys the current security and sharing model.

• Compare and contrast various techniques, approaches and considerations for capturing and managing business and technical metadata (for example, business dictionary, data lineage, taxonomy, data classification).

• Compare and contrast the different reasons for implementing big objects versus standard/custom objects within a production instance, alongside the unique pros and cons of utilizing big objects in a Salesforce data model.

• Given a customer scenario, recommend approaches and techniques to avoid data skew (record locking, sharing calculation issues, and excessive child to parent relationships).

Master Data Management: 5%

• Compare and contrast the various techniques, approaches and considerations for implementing master data management (MDM) Solutions (for example, MDM implementation styles; harmonizing and consolidating data from multiple sources; establishing data survivorship rules, thresholds and weights; leveraging external reference data for enrichment; canonical modeling techniques, hierarchy management).

• Given a customer scenario, recommend and use techniques for establishing a "golden record" or "system of truth" for the customer domain in a single org.

• Given a customer scenario, recommend approaches and techniques for consolidating data attributes from multiple sources. Discuss criteria and methodology for picking the winning attributes.

• Given a customer scenario, recommend appropriate approaches and techniques to capture and maintain customer reference and metadata to preserve traceability and establish a common context for business rules.

Salesforce Data Management: 25%

• Given a customer scenario, recommend appropriate combination of Salesforce license types to effectively leverage standard and custom objects to meet business needs.

• Given a customer scenario, recommend techniques to ensure data is persisted in a consistent manner.

• Given a scenario with multiple systems of interaction, describe techniques to represent a single view of the customer on the Salesforce Platform.

• Given a customer scenario, recommend a design to effectively consolidate and/or leverage data from multiple Salesforce instances.

Data Governance: 10%

• Given a customer scenario, recommend an approach for designing a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant data model. Discuss the various options to identify, classify, and protect personal and sensitive information.

• Compare and contrast various approaches and considerations for designing and implementing an enterprise data governance program.

Large Data Volume Considerations: 20%

• Given a customer scenario, design a data model that scales considering LDV and solution performance.

• Given a customer scenario, recommend a data archiving and purging plan that is optimal for the customer's data storage management needs.

• Given a customer scenario, decide when to use virtualized data and describe virtualized data options.

Data Migration: 15%

• Given a customer scenario, recommend appropriate techniques and methods for ensuring high data quality at load time.

• Compare and contrast various techniques for improving performance when migrating LDVs into Salesforce.

• Compare and contrast various techniques and considerations for exporting data from Salesforce.