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Skinny tables in Salesforce are useful in accessing the fields which are frequently USED and to avoid joins. This can improve the performance of certain read-only operations such as reports, list views, etc. Skinny tables are highly effective because skinny tables will be in sync with source tables even when the source tables are modified. 

You need to contact Salesforce customer support if you want to use skinny tables. You cannot create, access, or modify skinny tables yourself. For example, you need to contact Salesforce to update your skinny table definition if you want to add new fields.

Considerations for skinny tables are:

• It can contain an utmost of 100 columns.
• It cannot HOLD fields from other objects.
• For full SANDBOXES, these skinny tables are copied to your full sandbox organizations. For other types of sandboxes, skinny tables are not copied into your sandbox organizations. To have production skinny tables to be activated, contact Salesforce customer support.

The below figure displays an Account view, a CORRESPONDING database table along with a skinny table that can SPEED up account queries.

The fiscal year or economical year is defined as the period of time used for calculating annual financial STATEMENTS based on starting and ending date of a company’s financial year. In this period of time, whatever the amount of business that Salesforce has done can be considered as fiscal year and depicts the Salesforce revenue.

There are TWO types of fiscal years in Salesforce. They are:

• Normal or standard fiscal year: It is a period that allows estimating by following the GREGORIAN calendar year that has a 12-month structure. Starting of the fiscal year can begin with the very first day of any month you choose belonging to a particular year. For example, for the fiscal year starting in April, the standard fiscal year is used.
• Custom fiscal year: It is mainly defined for the companies that lay their forecast based on weekly or quarterly financial planning and can also customize the same. For example, you MAY have 4 quarters with 13 weeks per quarter in a 4-4-5 pattern or 13 periods per year.

Below are the two TYPES of Apex triggers in Salesforce:

Before triggers: It can be used to update or validate record values before it is saved to the database.

After triggers: It can be used to ACCESS field values of the records that are set by the SYSTEM (such as record’s ID or LastModifiedDate field) that are STORED in the database and use this field VALUE to do the changes in other records. Records that fire after the triggers are read-only.

• Page layouts are used to control the layout and organization of buttons, fields, Visualforce, custom links, s-controls, and related lists on object record pages.
• They are helpful in organizing user interface pages by determining which fields, related lists, and custom links are required, read-only, and visible for the user.
• We can create many page layouts and APPLY them to different user groups, with the aim of creating a customized experience. For EXAMPLE, you could have a single ACCOUNT record like ACME Corp., but it displays different information depending on your user profile.
• Here, you can only apply the one-page layout to a single GROUP of users per object, per record type. For example, if you have one record type based on the Accounts object, you can apply only one-page layout per profile.

• Salesforce record types PERMIT us to associate different business processes and display different picklist values and page layouts to different users based on the user profile.
• Administrators are having the ability to associate record types with the user profiles so that, in the record’s DETAIL page, different users will be ABLE to see different picklist values and page layouts.
• For example, consider a case where record types are most often used i.e., to create two different sales processes on the OPPORTUNITY object. Each of them with different sales stages and page layouts. This will indicate that with record types you will be able to apply multiple page layouts per object as well as per user profile.
• Benefits of record types:
  • It modifies user interaction experience to specific needs of the business.
  • Allows for administration in a simple manner as there are fewer FIELDS to maintain.

• Visualforce can be defined as the UI for the Force.com platform that ALLOWS developers to build sophisticated, custom user interfaces which can be hosted natively on the LIGHTNING platform.
• This Visualforce framework includes a tag-based markup language, a SET of server-side “standard controllers” that forms basic database operations(such as queries and saves) and each Visualforce tag corresponds to a user interface components such as a field, SECTION of a page, or a related list, etc.
• It works on the standard MVC model. It can have strong integration with the database and deploy auto-generated controllers for database OBJECTS. The behavior of Visualforce components can be controlled by the developer, by utilizing the same logic that was used in standard Salesforce pages. It is also possible for a developer to associate their own logic with a controller class written in Apex code.

There are many things that cause data loss in Salesforce. They are:

Human error:

• When editing an object definition (incorrectly changing a picklist), importing data (overwriting good data with BAD), or merging households are the common situations where human error may occur.
• For example, when you import data, it becomes important to match up fields. Situations like moving to percent, number, and money from other data types or changing text AREA to URL, email, phone or text, etc. will lead to incorrect match in fields. If you are updating a large number of records and match up incorrect fields, your records will be invalid.

Accidental deletion of Salesforce data:

• A record (or multiple records) might be accidentally deleted by users or employees. Deleting records could be because of MISCOMMUNICATION, forgetting to remove a contact from being deleted, and many other reasons. So proper training and having a trusted backup/recovery solution are much important.

Purposeful deletion of Salesforce data:

• Disgruntled employees like the person who has recently got a very bad performance REVIEW and thinks their job is at stake or who is jealous of other employees might try to delete the data. A few clicks on the delete button may lead to the deletion of multiple records from Salesforce.
• If they empty their recycle bin, that data recovery will be difficult using the Weekly Export. It can cause numerous damages if these records are not backed up properly.

Data sync errors:

• If you have more than one admin or use Outlook for Salesforce, you might experience a data sync error at some point.
• For example, one admin is TRYING to refresh a sandbox while another admin is working from home and trying to edit an object type in that same sandbox. When this happens, the admin who was editing the object can lose his work in progress.
• Contacts in Outlook can over-write good Salesforce data when using Outlook for Salesforce, introducing errors through inappropriate sync.

• Validation RULES in Salesforce consist of a formula or expressions that evaluate the data in one or more fields in a record to MEET the standards you specify before the USER can save the record. It returns a “True” or “False” value based on the evaluation of the data. Validation rules are responsible for displaying an error message to the user when the condition is “True” due to an invalid value.
• Validation rules are helpful in enforcing integrity constraints against the data. Here we give conditions in the formula editor. If one validation rule fails, Salesforce proceeds to check another validation rule held within the field or record and shows an appropriate error message at that particular field or above the record.
• You are allowed to create validation rules for fields, objects, campaign members, or CASE milestones. For example, we can create a validation rule that fires when a user tries to save an account with the incorrect LENGTH for the account number.

Some of Salesforce dashboard components are explained below:

• Gauge: It is used for displaying a SINGLE value within a custom value range.
• Metric: This is used for showing a single PAIR of key–values. We can enter the metric label directly on the components by clicking the empty text field next to the GRAND total. All metrics placed in the dashboard column would be displayed as a single component.
• Table: Tables are used for showing report data in the form of lists. For example, top five or bottom five opportunities.
• Visualforce page: It is used for forming a custom component as a dashboard or displaying information that is not available in other component types.
• Charts: It is used for showing comparisons. Charts are DIVIDED into 6 types. They are line Chart, vertical bar chart, horizontal bar chart, donut, pie, and funnel.

Force.com is the ENTIRE framework and codebase on which the WHOLE SALESFORCE application EXISTS. We can also say that Salesforce is built on Force.com, which is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that allows us to simplify the design, development, and deployment of cloud-based applications and websites. Developers can work with Cloud Integrated Development Environment (Cloud IDE) and deploy the applications on the servers of Force.com.

Reports will give a clear picture to the management. Management will make use of reports to track progress towards its various goals, increase revenue, and control expenditure. Reports will also help to predict trends and thus gives the advantage of the increase in profits.

There are four types of reports in Salesforce. They are as follows:

• Matrix report
  • A report is formed by grouping the records by ROWS as well as columns. It is used when you want to see data by two separate dimensions that aren’t related, such as DATE and product.
  • Example: Summarize opportunities by account HORIZONTALLY and by month vertically.
• Summary report
  • A report that provides a listing of data with groupings and subtotals. It is used when subtotals are needed, based on the value of a particular field, or when you want to create a hierarchically grouped report.
  • Example: All opportunities for your team subtotaled by owner and sales stage.
• Tabular report
  • A report that provides details of a company in tabular FORMAT. It is used when you want a simple list or an item list with a grand total.
  • Example: These reports are used to list all accounts, list of opportunities, list of contacts, etc.
• JOINED report
  • A report that is created by the mixture of any combination of reports. Like matrix report plus summary report can give you a joined report. Also, matrix reports and tabular reports can give a joined report.
  • Example: You can develop a report to display opportunity, case, and activity data for your accounts.

A Permission Set is a collection of settings or PERMISSIONS that is used to GIVE access to numerous TOOLS and functions for the user. You can use permission sets for different types of users to extend functional access without changing their profiles. Instead of creating a separate profile each time, you COULD easily create a Permission Set.

Junction OBJECTS are useful in BUILDING MANY-to-many RELATIONSHIPS between objects in Salesforce.

Consider an EXAMPLE of recruiting application, where a position for a job is linked to many candidates or a candidate can apply for many other jobs. Here, a third-party object “job application” is referred to as a junction object in order to connect the data model. In the above-given example, “job application” is the junction object.

• Governor limits control how much data a SHARED database can store. They help to make sure that no one monopolizes the shared resources like storage, CPU, and memory. Whenever the Apex CODE exceeds the limit, it issues a runtime exception that cannot be handled.
• The following list GIVES some of the governor limits in Salesforce:
  • Push notification limits
  • Per-TRANSACTION Apex limits
  • Size-Specific Apex limits
  • Miscellaneous Apex limits
  • Static Apex limits
  • Email limits
• Examples of governor limits in Salesforce:
  • The total number of sendEmail methods permitted is 10.
  • The total number of records retrieved by a SOQL query is 50,000.
  • Maximum CPU time on the Salesforce servers is 10,000ms on SYNCHRONOUS Apex.
  • The total number of callouts(web services calls or HTTP requests) in a transaction is 100.