Salesforce Certified Data Architect Practice Exam

A global retail company is migrating 500 million historical transaction records to Salesforce. The records are rarely accessed but must be available for compliance reporting. Which Salesforce data storage solution should the data architect recommend?

1. Big Objects to store the historical transactions, with Async SOQL for reporting
2. External Objects connected to the legacy system via Salesforce Connect
3. A custom Heroku database with OData integration
4. Custom objects with archival record types and a scheduled purge job

A financial institution is experiencing slow SOQL query performance on an Account object with 20 million records. Most queries filter by Account Type and Region. What should the data architect recommend to improve query performance?

1. Partition the Account object into separate custom objects by region
2. Add skinny tables through Salesforce Support
3. Convert the Account object to a Big Object
4. Request a custom composite index on Account Type and Region from Salesforce Support

A company is migrating from SAP to Salesforce — Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities with complex lookup relationships and 5 million records. What is the correct approach for maintaining referential integrity?

1. Use Data Loader with auto-matching to resolve relationships after all data is loaded
2. Load all objects simultaneously using parallel Bulk API jobs
3. Load parent objects first, then children, using external ID fields for relationship mapping
4. Create temporary text fields for relationship keys and resolve them with a post-migration flow

An e-commerce company wants to display real-time product inventory from its warehouse management system on Salesforce record pages without storing the data in Salesforce. Which solution should the data architect recommend?

1. A scheduled batch job that syncs inventory data every 5 minutes
2. A Lightning Web Component that calls the warehouse API directly from the browser
3. Platform Events to stream inventory updates into a custom Salesforce object
4. External Objects using Salesforce Connect with an OData adapter

A healthcare organization must deduplicate patient Contact records based on Last Name, Date of Birth, and a custom National ID field. Which configuration should the data architect implement?

1. A matching rule with fuzzy match on Last Name and exact match on the other fields, paired with a duplicate rule that alerts users
2. A before-save flow that searches for duplicates and blocks the save
3. A Batch Apex job that runs nightly to merge duplicate Contacts
4. A validation rule that queries for existing records with the same field values

A manufacturing company has an Account ownership skew problem where a single integration user owns 3 million Account records. What should the data architect recommend?

1. Increase the sharing recalculation timeout threshold
2. Convert the Account org-wide default to Public Read/Write
3. Redistribute ownership of the records across users by region or business unit
4. Move the 3 million records to a Big Object

A telecom company stores Customer, Contract, and Service records. Each Customer has multiple Contracts; each Contract has multiple Services. Roll-up summaries of Service revenue are needed at both levels. How should the data architect design the data model?

1. Master-detail relationships (Service to Contract to Customer), leveraging native roll-up summary fields
2. Lookup relationships between all three objects, calculating roll-ups with Apex
3. External objects with Salesforce Connect for aggregation
4. A single flat object with record types for each entity

A data architect is planning a weekend migration of 50 million records using the Bulk API within a 48-hour window. Which approach should maximize throughput?

1. Bulk API 1.0 in serial mode
2. REST API with individual record inserts
3. Data Loader with the maximum batch size
4. Bulk API 2.0 with parallel processing and optimally sized data files

A governance team finds 30% of Account records have missing or inconsistent Industry values. They want to enforce quality going forward and clean existing data. What strategy should the data architect implement?

1. A screen flow for data entry that requires Industry, plus Data Loader for existing records
2. A validation rule to enforce Industry, plus a Batch Apex cleanup of existing records
3. A page-layout required-field constraint
4. A report to identify bad records, with emails to Account owners

A data architect needs an archival strategy for an org approaching its storage limit. Case records older than two years should be archived but still accessible. Which approach should the data architect recommend?

1. Compress the Case records by removing attachment data
2. Move old Cases to a secondary Salesforce org
3. Delete old Cases and rely on the Recycle Bin
4. Export old Cases to Big Objects and build a custom Lightning component for lookup access