Hello! I need to allow our customer service reps to view data related to our customers when they pull up their account. The issue is that the data related to our customers is external to SF (customer search data, related marketing data, etc.). This data is large (we are talking about 200-300 GB worth of data in total, 100-200 million records ... potentially growing in the future).

So moving this data (which is read-only as far as the customer service rep is concerned) in SF to me seems impractical and expensive (SF storage is not cheap). 

We already have all this data in the desired format, staged outside of SF (in various on-prem Oracle DBs). 

What would be the best way to approach this? What have other people done so far? 
Hook up the Account page to a VF page that calls a service (Java) that queries the data?
Hook up the Account external objects to oData connecting directly to the database? 
Any preference or difference over databases on-prem or cloud and if cloud ... did anyone have any good results with a specific cloud data storage configuration? (in terms of performance/respons times, etc.).

PS: can't use Heroku because the Heroku DBs are not SOX compliant right now. That's what we would have done but ... we can't. Didn't pass SOX validation. 

Thanks!

I am trying to figure out what would be the best way to approach this problem:
In the account table (for all record types) we have 4 email fields: email, email2, email3 and email4. 
I need to be able to flag these emails as "unsubscribed" so that when our call center pulls up a customer profile they can see if the customer chose to pull their email(s) from subscribing to our mailing list
An email can be shared across multiple accounts (our users have more than one account with us. We are working towards changing that but it will not change in the foreseeable future). 

So if I receive a feed with a list of emails and the instruction to unsubscribe them I want to update the flag for that email across multiple accounts.
At the same time if the customer updates the email status in one of his/her account I want the status change for that email to be reflected in all accounts that have that email. 

What would be the best way to approach this?

Option 1 - have an object that contains the list of all emails with status "unsubscribed". 
Pros - I have only one place to update or maintain the status flag
Cons - every time I pull up the account table the account needs to join to this object, pull up the status and display accordingly

Option 2 - create the flag direclty into the account object
Pros - simple to display (it's just part of the object) and if it's a feed update it's also not hard to do
Cons - I would have to code a trigger that would update the status in all records that have that email, for that specific email.

In the "traditional" world (Java/Oracle or any similar flavor of that) I'd create a seprate object and then just FK to it from the account table.

But I am aware that SF is not always "traditional" when it comes to these types of scenarios ... sometimes the usual approach doesn't always work best. 

Any guidance or thoughts about which approach works best in SalesForce? 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!!!

M

 fHello! would it be possible to create an extension table for the accountpartner table that would store additional information about links between accounts?

For instance can I create a new table associated to the accountpartner record through the record ID, to save additional information about how a specific link between two accounts was created (if we have customers pay to be associated to an account, I'd like to store the information about if that specific customer paid for that account or not for example)?

Thanks!

I am totally new to SalesForce ... I literally just started playing with it 2 days ago. I signed up for a few classes (for next month) in the meanwhile I started playing with queries and I came across a situation that I can't seem to find a solution to: inner joins in SOQL.

Here's the scenario. 

I have this:

and I have this:

and I want to use this:
 

SELECT *
FROM Account AS ato, AccountPartner AS ap, Account AS afrom
WHERE ap.AccountToID = ato.AccountID
and ap.AccountFromID = afrom.AccountID;

To get this:

How do I do it in SOQL?

PS: I dumped data in MS Access and ran the query I just pasted above ... That's where the join result set comes from.

Thank you!!

I am totally new to SalesForce ... I literally just started playing with it 2 days ago. I signed up for a few classes (for next month) in the meanwhile I started playing with queries and I came across a situation that I can't seem to find a solution to: inner joins in SOQL.

Here's the scenario. 

I have this:

and I have this:

and I want to use this:
 

SELECT *
FROM Account AS ato, AccountPartner AS ap, Account AS afrom
WHERE ap.AccountToID = ato.AccountID
and ap.AccountFromID = afrom.AccountID;

To get this:

How do I do it in SOQL?

PS: I dumped data in MS Access and ran the query I just pasted above ... That's where the join result set comes from.

Thank you!!

I am trying to figure out what would be the best way to approach this problem:
In the account table (for all record types) we have 4 email fields: email, email2, email3 and email4. 
I need to be able to flag these emails as "unsubscribed" so that when our call center pulls up a customer profile they can see if the customer chose to pull their email(s) from subscribing to our mailing list
An email can be shared across multiple accounts (our users have more than one account with us. We are working towards changing that but it will not change in the foreseeable future). 

So if I receive a feed with a list of emails and the instruction to unsubscribe them I want to update the flag for that email across multiple accounts.
At the same time if the customer updates the email status in one of his/her account I want the status change for that email to be reflected in all accounts that have that email. 

What would be the best way to approach this?

Option 1 - have an object that contains the list of all emails with status "unsubscribed". 
Pros - I have only one place to update or maintain the status flag
Cons - every time I pull up the account table the account needs to join to this object, pull up the status and display accordingly

Option 2 - create the flag direclty into the account object
Pros - simple to display (it's just part of the object) and if it's a feed update it's also not hard to do
Cons - I would have to code a trigger that would update the status in all records that have that email, for that specific email.

In the "traditional" world (Java/Oracle or any similar flavor of that) I'd create a seprate object and then just FK to it from the account table.

But I am aware that SF is not always "traditional" when it comes to these types of scenarios ... sometimes the usual approach doesn't always work best. 

Any guidance or thoughts about which approach works best in SalesForce? 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!!!

M

I am totally new to SalesForce ... I literally just started playing with it 2 days ago. I signed up for a few classes (for next month) in the meanwhile I started playing with queries and I came across a situation that I can't seem to find a solution to: inner joins in SOQL.

Here's the scenario. 

I have this:

and I have this:

and I want to use this:
 

SELECT *
FROM Account AS ato, AccountPartner AS ap, Account AS afrom
WHERE ap.AccountToID = ato.AccountID
and ap.AccountFromID = afrom.AccountID;

To get this:

How do I do it in SOQL?

PS: I dumped data in MS Access and ran the query I just pasted above ... That's where the join result set comes from.

Thank you!!