Salesforce Marketing Cloud — Data Extensions & Potential Integration errors

Julien Kervizic
Hacking Analytics
Published in
5 min readDec 19, 2019

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Photo by elCarito on Unsplash

Data extensions, are Salesforce Marketing Cloud name for database tables that users of marketing cloud can setup on the platform. SFMC uses under the hood a SQLServer database, whose SQL capabilities correspond to SQLServer 2005 version. Data Extensions are the objects onto which these SQL queries can be run.

Data Types

Text: is quite a straight forward data type. In SFMC, it has a maximum length of 4k characters. If you are trying to push a record with a text field than the length set in the data extension field, the Marketing Cloud API will reject the record and return the following error message:

'{"message":"Unable to save rows for data extension ID 123 ","errorcode":10006,"documentation":"","additionalErrors":[{"message":"sampltxt: The value for column [sampltxt] exceeds the column\'s maximum length.","errorcode":10000,"documentation":""}]}'

Email: The email type, is a specific field type in marketing cloud that goes through a few steps to ensure that an email is indeed “valid”. It performs three level of validation on emails: A syntax check, a mail server domain…

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Julien Kervizic
Hacking Analytics

Living at the interstice of business, data and technology | Head of Data at iptiQ by SwissRe | previously at Facebook, Amazon | julienkervizic@gmail.com