Partial Copy Sandboxes: "Ghost Dad"

Posted on Feb 27, 2017

Salesforce gave us Partial Copy Sandboxes (which I think have been renamed Partial Data Sandboxes) and Sandbox Templates a few releases ago, the former of which is sort've halfway between a Developer Pro sandbox and a Full sandbox, where it doesn't have all your data and can be refreshed more quickly than a full sandbox, and the latter is used to specify the data you want to copy from prod when refreshing a Full or Partial Copy Sandbox.

I wanted to write about some weirdness with Partial Copy Sandboxes.

Partial Copy Sandboxes have some limits, which (as of this posting) are namely a 5 GB total database space limit, and a 10,000 record limit per object.

Datetime sensitive operations? Make sure your application can control its own dates

Posted on Feb 03, 2017

Just a short post about an old lesson that I was reminded of today.

I've done a few projects for some financial institutions that include date sensitive operations and calculations, things that have to be aware of the current date and will change values depending on what the date is, or processes that need to execute in a certain order and need to be completed all within the same day, etc.

One of the key things we realized early on is that we would need to build these calculations (and to some extent the processes) so that:

  • The calculations had the flexibility to be executed "out of time" ie. you had the ability to simulate what the current date/date time was so you could get the results out of the calculations that you wanted.
  • The system had built-in time-senstive reminders to prompt users to take certain actions and not forget.

In the former, this was important for a few reasons: