Sharing is caring says Pavlina but at the same time she says that this book is so good that you need to own one. Well, I didn’t want to buy one, but luckily I borrow it from Martin, who didn’t need it for a while.

So many excitement this book got on Twitter, so I really looked forward to reading it. And by reading I mean page by page even though some people don’t recommend such approach.

Was I blown away? Well, not really, probably mostly because of my experience from the board, I got a feeling it doesn’t really go into depth, so if you want to take it as the book which will prepare you, I don’t think so. At the same time it is fair to say that if you just want to become better consultant/architect this book is really good, all the topics are included at one place and you’ll gain a lot.

What I found during my CTA preparation, and would say share this feeling with a lot of others, being alone is not the best idea, sharing and challenging each other works better. And it is the case of reading this book as well. One simple example – LDV (large data volume). „Easy“ topic, some well known information how to mitigate the risks, big debate among people what „large“ exactly means. The book says

which you can just swallow and say „wow, it is even more than I expected“ or ask around and get a great answer from Kid Jansen, who even did a great course about their migration.

Not sure where they got these numbers, but they seem to be just a wild grasp. Especially because the number is much higher for accounts than contacts, which makes no sense whatsoever, regardless of whether you use business contacts or person accounts. I would even go as far as saying that every account should have at least one contact.

But regardless of lack of logical sense it doesn’t make much sense technically either. Only record limits in that order of magnitude are 50M for Database.QueryLocator and 150M for # records per 24h rolling window for Bulk API (both old and 2.0), which is just the # records per batch limit (10k) multiplied with # batches per 24h rolling window (15k).

First ‚LDV‘ kind of issues already start at 200k records per object with potential non-selective or non-deterministic SOQL errors.

Even if you have everything bulkified and all your queries are selective and deterministic you can already have issues at much lower volumes than the ones mentioned with heap size, SOQL query run time limit, Apex execution time limit and Apex CPU time limit.

Generally I’d say >5M is moderately LDV and >10M is definitely LDV. The 5M for me comes from the SOQL selectivity threshold, which does not scale beyond 5.67M.

And this is super wow, because he even put all those numbers in context with other numbers you might know from the Salesforce world but never put them together. And that’s awesome.

Integrations

Another great topic are integrations, and I totally understand they copy the best practices from Salesforce materials, but at the same time you might wonder – why „Calling Salesforce using Apex web services“ is suboptimal solution, especially when it is the one you offer quite often. Totally get the explanation about the fact that you need to manage Apex code, at the same time writing your own REST API routine might not be that complex and it allows you to:

• simplify the work for the other party – instead of calling multiple endpoints and doing all the logic you will handle that, which will also simplify the development process for that and less consultations for you;
• you can tweak the logic whenever you want and are not dependent on the other party.

From my experience the integration topic is complex for many people and it is really great that the book summarise all the different ways how to connect (both ways), so you can easily get a glimpse.

There are way more

The book covers all the areas you can expect during the CTA board but more importantly it covers all the topics you should be fluent in.

If you are looking for preparation material for any architect certification this is a good book to help you, if you want to „just“ know more about what you are doing or what the people around you speak about, it is great book as well, if nothing else you will get the words you need for bluffing. And with some of them you will even surprise them how much you know, I mean I never heard some say FUSIAOLA!

Buy

Buy at Amazon or any good bookstore or borrow from a friend.

And now I need to get the blue one from someone.

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