Salesforce administrators and developers experience the challenges of maintaining a clean and safe production environment. Whether it’s bad code or bugs, various factors can affect the quality of business data sets. That’s why, to mitigate these risks, teams often implement sandbox seeding into their development cycles.
What Is Salesforce Sandbox Seeding?
Sandbox seeding in Salesforce involves loading a new or modified org with record data. This allows admins and developers to safely modify data before going live with a project, eliminating the need to make changes in production.
Benefits of Sandbox Seeding
There are numerous advantages to sandbox seeding that make this routine worthwhile. Not only does it increase efficiency when resolving issues and finishing projects, but it also provides a safe environment for testing and development. Consider how Salesforce sandbox seeding can impact the following scenarios:
1. Administrator Production
Admins typically work in their own environment when starting a new Salesforce project. Through sandbox seeding, admins can use individual developer sandboxes to deliver faster results without interfering with the project or disturbing end-user activities. This method also helps minimize privacy risks.
2. Testing Changes
Before new projects can go live, developers and administrators must work together to be sure that there are no issues. Sandbox seeding allows each person to place their modifications in a shared environment for testing, creating an environment that is easier to see how their changes will operate in production with the data in one location.
3. Quick-fix Issues
There may be a time where it is necessary to make quick fixes to data before moving it into production. While this action provides smoother production, it can lead to syncing problems with orgs. Seeding helps prevent any complications because it allows you to update testing and training sandboxes with the newest data and structural changes.
4. Managing Real Data
Sandbox seeding allows you to accurately store real data in environments, making it simpler to train new employees and users. Using real data can also detect errors quickly, therefore, helping predict how adjustments will impact production and user workflows.
Sandbox Seeding Challenges
While sandbox seeding can enhance numerous business activities, it can impact operations if not performed correctly. It is important to be aware of any challenges. Here are a few to consider:
- Security risks for data — Sandboxes used for development and testing often store sensitive information. Protecting this data can be difficult, leading to potential privacy risks with potential long-term impacts for any organization.
- Issues with data restore — Each seeding instance comes with new requirements that may obstruct the development cycle from accessing the most up-to-date metadata. As a result, restoring your sandboxes can be a tedious process.
- Unnecessary data — If there is a large amount of unrelated data in your databases, you may have trouble moving vital information to the correct sandboxes. This issue can lead to production errors and obstruct your ability to test systems.
- Cost increases — Partial and full copy sandboxes can raise Salesforce production costs. Using a data loader tool to shift data between orgs manually can be expensive.
- Inconsistent data — If your sandboxes have data inconsistencies, you may experience bugs that delay development. If you need to manually compare differences in sandbox and production environments to fix this problem, it can lead to ineffectiveness.
Streamline Salesforce Sandbox Seeding with Druva
The #1 challenge for most admins and developers is having a readily available sandbox with adequate test data. The tedious process of manually populating a sandbox is time-consuming and error-prone. Druva delivers high-quality data that is secure and usable. Users migrate all or specific records for a particular test scenario, maintain all parent-child relationships, and mask any sensitive fields in one quick operation. Reduce the wait time for sandboxes to speed up development and testing. Seed every developer sandbox with precisely the data you need, exactly where you need it, no matter how complex your data model is.
Download our datasheet on Salesforce Sandbox seeding to see how Druva can help you eliminate the repetitive tasks needed to create reliable test data, and achieve significant cost savings up to 10-20X compared to full sandboxes.