I am trying to import account and contacts from a SQL server database. By default SalesForce wants to use the account name. What's been happening is that when the account name from my SQL database doesn't match exactly with the name in SalesForce, duplicated accounts would be created. Even a tiny discrepancy like 'INC' vs. 'INC.' would create duplicate.

I read from some help articals that I could use an External ID as the matching criteira. But the import wizard's matching type only has Salesforce.com ID' and 'name and Site'. I did create a customized field for Account, and specified that it should be required, unique, and is an External ID. But this option is not there. 

So how do I get to specify I want to import by using the External ID as the matching type?

Thank you!

I am a Java developer and I am new to SalesForce. I am taking over the SalesForce admin role from a marketing person.

My company uses SalesForce to track sales leads and clients.  I have some 2,000 accounts and about 10,000 contacts. My main database is on SQL server 2007. These contacts have tons of transactions in my main database. About 10,000 transactions a day. Contacts in my system are being identified as requestor of those transactions.

Now I want to use SalesForce's nice reporting feature to report out of those transactions. And I need some historical statistics. So I need to report out of maybe one million records.

What's the best way to do this? Import all these transactions from my SQL server DB to sales force? Or should I explore the option to have Sales Force to connect to SQL server DB? I looked at the import option and realized that those data will take lots of data storage space. Sales Force only gave me 1GB data storage :(

As I said, I am new to SalesForce. Not sure what's the best practice. Could someone please help me out? Thank you!

I am a Java developer and I am new to SalesForce. I am taking over the SalesForce admin role from a marketing person.

My company uses SalesForce to track sales leads and clients.  I have some 2,000 accounts and about 10,000 contacts. My main database is on SQL server 2007. These contacts have tons of transactions in my main database. About 10,000 transactions a day. Contacts in my system are being identified as requestor of those transactions.

Now I want to use SalesForce's nice reporting feature to report out of those transactions. And I need some historical statistics. So I need to report out of maybe one million records.

What's the best way to do this? Import all these transactions from my SQL server DB to sales force? Or should I explore the option to have Sales Force to connect to SQL server DB? I looked at the import option and realized that those data will take lots of data storage space. Sales Force only gave me 1GB data storage :(

As I said, I am new to SalesForce. Not sure what's the best practice. Could someone please help me out? Thank you!