Salesforce data migration using Flosum’s Data Migrator
Data migration is one of the key aspects of Salesforce implementation. Your organization may require data migration for several purposes such as:
- Data requirement for testing
- Backing up a data set into another sandbox
- Populating partial copy sandboxes with some data from prod
- Keeping a gold data set that can be migrated into multiple sandboxes
- Data requirement to support product demos, etc.
There are several products out there to support Salesforce data migration including Salesforce data import wizard and Apex Data Loader. Then there are third party migration tools such as informatica cloud data wizard.
In this article, I want to specifically outline the capabilities of Flosum’s Data Migrator tool which I have been using for almost a year now. I must say this is one of the best tools for salesforce data migration that I have used till now.
One of the challenges that I faced with prior data migrations was maintaining the relationships across various objects and their records. Doing it via data loader is tedious and prone to errors. Another challenge was to obfuscate production data when using for testing or demo purposes. Fortunately, Data Migrator has support for both of those use cases.
It comes as a managed package product which you can install in your data source org, build data sets and then define a sequence to control the flow of data migration. Once the sequence is defined, you can authenticate into your target org and start the migration process.
Key features:
- Maintain hierarchy and relationships among parent and child records
- Build data sets for child objects by simply clicking on a button
- Build and reuse data sets and sequences in the salesforce UI
- Ability to disable validation rules in the target org
- Ability to disable triggers in the target org
- Ability to add recursive steps to self reference a salesforce object
- Control flow of data migration
- Validate record counts prior to migration
Troubleshooting:
This tool does a pretty good job at displaying any errors before your migration actually happens. Some of the common errors include, certain fields from your data set do not exist in target org, you don’t have permissions to view/edit certain fields in target org, or if your data set includes fields that are supposed to be unique or some formula fields.
You will get log level details for any error that happens during/after the migration process. You can take the job Id from the logs and go to target org and find the bulk data job, download the results and look at the errors.
Post Migration Steps:
After the migration succeeds, be sure to verify the data in target org to confirm that the data did get migrated as per your expectations. Don’t forget to turn back on the validation rules and triggers if you chose to disable them before the migration.
UI Screenshots:





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