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How to Pass Salesforce Certified Data Cloud Consultant Exam

How to Pass Salesforce Certified Data Cloud Consultant Exam.

The Salesforce Certified Data Cloud Consultant certification is ideal for consultants who have experience implementing and consulting on enterprise data platforms in a customer-facing role, including designing, configuring, and architecting solutions.

1. About the Salesforce Data Cloud Consultant Exam

contentContent60 multiple-choice
durationTime allotted105 minutes
bulls eyePassing score62% (38 out of 50 questions)
price tagExam FeeUSD 200 plus applicable taxes
retryRetake FeeUSD 100 plus applicable taxes
optionsPrerequisiteNone

For up to date information about this certification please refer to the official exam guide here!

2. Salesforce Data Cloud Consultant Exam Outline

TopicsWeightingQuestions
Solution Overview18%11 Questions
Data Cloud Setup & Administration12%7 Questions
Data Ingestion & Modeling20%12 Questions
Identity Resolution14%8 Questions
Segmentation and Insights18%11 Questions
Act on Data18%11 Questions
Salesforce Data Cloud Consultant Exam Outline

3. Salesforce Data Cloud Consultant Exam Study Course

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4. Important Topics for the Salesforce Data Cloud Consultant Exam

4.1 Solution Overview 18% (11 Questions)

  • A customer data platform (CDP) is a place where a company collects and stores data about its customers. 
  • With Customer Data Platform you can:
    • Create unified customer profiles across all touch points by connecting identities, engagement data, customer orders, loyalty, and marketing journeys.
    • Build smarter audience segments using insights and filtering capabilities.
    • Activate data from anywhere across your organization.
    • Capture and unify data from anywhere with a high-scale data ingestion service.
    • Analyze your data using tools like Tableau or Marketing Cloud Intelligence.
  • Customer 360 Data Model is Customer Data Platform’s standard data model 
  • Data Cloud features cover functionality for enterprise customer data in five key categories:
    • Connect – Data Cloud offers multiple methods that allow users to connect their data:
      • Connectors
      • APIs
      • MuleSoft
    • Harmonize – Map data between your connected data sources and the Customer 360 Data Model.
    • Unify – Link all the different data records that refer to the same real-world entity or object, such as a person.
    • Analyze and Predict – Aggregate and analyze data across multiple channels and touchpoints, businesses optimize marketing strategies, improve customer experiences, and drive business performance.
    • Act – Create smart segments and activate them anywhere.
  • Customer 360 Data Model Terminology
    • Subject Area – A term used to group similar data objects to aid in data modeling
    • Data Stream – A data source brought into Customer Data Platform
    • Data Model Object (DMO) – A grouping of data (made up of attributes) that are created from data streams, insights, and other sources
    • Attribute – A specific piece of data found in a DMO
    • Foreign Key – A common link found between data sources that builds data relationships
  • Data Cloud Capabilities
    • Ingestion – Consume or activate data to any cloud and any application
    • Identity – Connect, match and resolve customer data
    • Segmentation and Activation – Create smart segments and activate anywhere
    • Insights – Embed your data with intelligence and make it available to analytics systems
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4.2 Data Setup & Administration 12% (7 Questions)

  • Customer Data Platform for Admins
  • Data Cloud Implementation preparation steps
    • Identify project stakeholders.
    • Identify data sources and integrations.
    • Understand system requirements.
    • Identify Customer Data Platform users.
    • Document all business requirements.
  • Data Cloud Permission Sets
    • Data Cloud Admin—Users with this permission set can access all functionality within Data Cloud, including mapping data to the data model and creating data streams, identity resolution rulesets, and calculated insights.
    • Data Cloud User—Users with this permission set can view Data Cloud features.
  • Segmentation and Activation Add-On License Permission Sets
    • Data Cloud for Marketing Admin—Users with this permission set can manage day-to-day configuration needs, support, maintenance, and improvement and perform regular internal system audits.
    • Data Cloud for Marketing Data Aware Specialist—Users with this permission set can map data to the data model and create data streams, identity resolution rulesets, and calculated insights.
    • Data Cloud for Marketing Manager—Users with this permission set can manage an overall segmentation strategy, including creating activation targets and activations.
    • Data Cloud for Marketing Specialist—Users with this permission set can create segments.
  • Starter data bundles are pre-modeled standardized data sets and are available for Marketing Cloud Email Studio, MobileConnect, and MobilePush.
  • Sharing rules can be used on Salesforce Data Cloud to control access
  • Sharing rules can be applied to the following Data Cloud objects:
    • Data Stream
    • Calculated Insights
    • Segment
    • Activation Target
    • Activation
  • Data Cloud setup process steps order
    1. Configure Admin user
    2. Provision Data Cloud
    3. Create profiles and configure additional users
    4. Connect to relevant Salesforce Clouds
  • Salesforce Data Cloud home page
Salesforce CDP Tabs
  • Data Cloud Tabs
    • Data Streams and Data Model provide insight into your selected data model and connected data sources that are created by the data aware specialist user.
    • Calculated Insights are predefined and calculated metrics that can help you build segments.
    • Identity Resolutions is where your team creates match and reconciliation rules to unify individual records. 
    • Data Explorer and Profile Explorer are data-viewing tools, allowing you to view your ingested and unified profile data, respectively.
    • Segments tab is where you create your filtered audience segments.
    • Activation Targets and Activations are used to manage where segments get exported, for example Marketing Cloud.

4.3 Data Ingestion & Modeling 20% (12 Questions)

  • Marketing Cloud Connect user requirements
    • Must have only two roles assigned: Administrator and Marketing Cloud Administrator.
    • Must have the Enterprise business unit (top level) assigned as default.
    • Must have access assigned to any other child business unit from which data needs to be ingested.
  • MC Connect connection is established at the account level (Enterprise Business Unit)
  • Marketing Cloud supports one-to-one (1:1) and one-to-many (1:M) connections with Data Cloud. 
  • Connections from multiple Marketing Cloud accounts to a single Data Cloud instance (M:1) are not supported.
  • CRM orgs connectable by the Salesforce CRM connector
    • Home Org – Org where Data Cloud is installed
    • External Org – Orgs that are external to the org where Data Cloud is installed
    • Sandbox Org – Sandbox CRM orgs that are external to the org where Data Cloud is installed
  • Data Cloud and Loyalty Management must be installed within the same org to support Activation to Loyalty Management.
  • Salesforce CRM supports 1:1, 1:M, and M:1 connections with Data Cloud.
  • You can connect a total of 5 CRM orgs to Customer Data Platform.
  • Prerequisites for the B2C Commerce Cloud Connector configuration 
    • The B2C Commerce instance should be implemented and owned by a customer.
    • Commerce Einstein must be activated in order for data to flow from B2C Commerce to Data Cloud.
    • The user configuring the connection needs to have access to B2C Commerce Business Manager.
  • B2C Commerce supports 1:1, 1:M, and M:1 connections with Data Cloud.
  • Non-production B2C Commerce instances (dev, testing, sandbox) are not currently supported.
  • Marketing Cloud Personalization Connector prerequisites
    • The user configuring the connection needs to have Admin permission in Marketing Cloud Personalization.
    • Data Cloud Gear has to be enabled in the Marketing Cloud Personalization dataset(s) that are to be connected.
    • All user attributes should be defined in your Marketing Cloud Personalization dataset.
  • Marketing Cloud Personalization supports 1:1 and M:1 dataset connections with Data Cloud.
  • Steps to configure the data stream
  • Select data source
  • Select source object (dataset)
    1. Define data stream properties
    2. Confirm data source object schema
    3. Apply necessary row-level transforms
    4. Configure updates to data source object
    5. Apply necessary row level transforms
    6. Configure updates to data source objects
  • The data stream with the Engagement Category has a limit of 2000 unique dates at the date granularity per single ingestion.
  • If the Refresh Mode is set to Full Refresh, Marketing Cloud only exports the data set on a daily (24 hours) cadence.  
  • Marketing Cloud starter data bundles – Provides access to the messaging and engagement data, including campaign and journey details, and message template metadata.
    • Email Studio – Includes engagement events, including opens, clicks, bounces, complaints, unsubscribes, Einstein Engagement Scores, campaigns, journeys, and enterprise profile attributes
    • MobilePush – Includes engagement events, such as sends, opens, displays, undelivers, geofence entries and exits, Einstein Engagement Scores, campaigns, journeys, push message template metadata, and contact point (app).
    • MobileConnect – Includes engagement events such as sends, delivers, undelivers, opt-ins, and opt-outs, campaigns, journeys, SMS message template metadata, and the contact point (phone).
  • The Full Refresh option can only be used for a data set with 50 million records or less. For larger groups, use one of the delta extract options.
  • There are two options for Refresh Mode: Upsert and Full Refresh.
  • Last 90 days of the data will be exported and ingested into Data Cloud for the initial historical load.
  • The initial extraction of historical data from Marketing Cloud may take up to 24 hours.
  • If the wrong Data Extract option is selected during initial setup, it can’t be changed post creation. 
  • The starter data bundle can not be ingested multiple times.  
  • Access to the objects and fields, must be explicitly granted via the Salesforce Data Cloud Salesforce Connector Integration permission set. Failing to do this results in an Insufficient Permissions error message.
  • During data stream configuration, Field Name and Field API Name of the CRM object field can be updated at the schema review step.
  • Data and Identity in Customer Data Platform
  • Customer 360 Data Model Components
    • Subject Area (A Business Goal)
    • Data Model Object, also called DMOs (Groups of Data)
    • Attributes (Data About Your Contacts)
  • Customer Data Platform, the system can only unify profiles if they are mapped correctly to the individual object and one other element: a contact point object or a party identifier object
  • Individual Object – All the personal information you know about your customer.
  • Contact Point Objects – Contact points (things like email, phone, address, device, and social) all have associated objects that can be used for identity resolution.
  • Party Identification Object –  Party identifier matching allows you to use your own customer-supplied identifiers.
  • Identity Resolution Rulesets – Allow you to configure match rules and reconciliation rules about a specific object, such as individual. 
  • Two types of rules that make up a ruleset:
    • Match Rules – Used to link together multiple records in a unified customer profile.
    • Reconciliation Rules – Determine the logic for data selection  
  • Match Rules match methods
    • Exact
    • Fuzzy
    • Normalized
  • While setting up new data stream Field Label and Field API Name can be edited
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  • Segement – Filter your data to create useful segments to understand, target, and analyze your customers.
  • Publish – Process of searching and building a segment based on the filter criteria. You can publish your segments on a chosen schedule or as needed.
  • Activation – Process of moving audience segments to an activation target.
  • Individuals: A specific person or customer from a specific data source, like Marketing Cloud.
  • Unified individual: A customer profile whose data has been merged based on multiple sources using Identity Resolution rules.
  • Once an attribute path has been selected in a container, it can’t be changed.
  • Customer Data Platform segments can be used in Journey Builder.
  • You need to go to Activations to activate a segment in Customer Data Platform
  • Data Source Object (DSO) – The object that underpins the data object.
  • Data Lake Object (DLO) – The target destination for the records from the data streams.
  • Data Model Object (DMO) – The entity within the Data Cloud data model the consolidates data of the same nature from numerous data sources through the data lake objects.
  • Customer 360 Data Model – Used to be known as Cloud Information Model (CIM), refers to the foundation of the Marketing Cloud Data Cloud standard data model.
  • Harmonization is the process of mapping the ingested data in alignment with the Customer 360 Data Model.
  • Data Explorer is used to inspect the data in data source objects, data model objects, and calculated insights objects.
  •  Activities possible on the Data Explorer:
    • Preview data 
    • Inspect multiple object types
    • Validate formula fields
  • Customer 360 Data Model Overview
Salesforce CDP Data Model
Image Source: https://architect.salesforce.com/diagrams/template-gallery/cdp-overview-data-model
  • The Customer 360 Data Model is organized into subject areas that represent a major business activity, such as customer information, product, or engagement data.
  • Subject areas consist of data model objects (DMO).
  • A DMO is a grouping of data created from data streams, insights, and other data sources. The DMO includes attributes (also called fields).
  • An attribute is a specific piece of data stored in Customer Data Platform, for example, a customer’s first name.
  • Data mapping requirements
    • When you’re mapping a data model object (DMO) in the Profile or Other category, you map the primary key field. You can save the data mapping only after mapping the primary key.
    • When you’re mapping a DMO in the Engagement category, you map the primary key field and the Event dateTime field. You can save the mapping only after mapping both fields.
    • To use identity resolution, segmentation, and activation, map the required fields and relationships for the party area data. You must also map the Individual object and either a Contact Point or the Party Identification object must be mapped in data streams.
    • The values for the individual.Id field must be unique across all data sources that map to the Individual DMO
  • Contact Point and Customer Profile must be mapped to the Individual DMO to enable the unification and activation process to work.
  • In a data model the Individual Object referenced in other DMOs via Party Attribute
  • Customer 360 Data Model Subject Areas
    • Case Data Model – Groups and defines recorded issues, such as laptop connectivity problems or support tickets.
    • Engagement Data Model – Defines interactions with a party. Example interactions could be speaking to a customer over the phone or receiving a customer email.
    • Party Data Model – Groups data model objects (DMO) that reflect contact information (personal or business) for a specific customer or account.
    • Privacy Data Model – Tracks and stores certain data privacy preferences. Keep in mind that deciding how to honor customer privacy preferences is up to you.
    • Product Subject Area – Defines anything you plan to sell or any part of a product to track for service purposes.
    • Sales Order Data Object – Defines the future revenue or quantity for an opportunity by product family and rolls it up by territory, management (role), or hierarchy.
    • Additional Standard Data Model Objects – Includes other standard data model objects that can help organize data in Customer Data Platform.
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4.4 Identity Resolution 14% (8 Questions)

  • Customer Data Platform, the system can only unify profiles if they are mapped correctly to the individual object and one other element: a contact point object or a party identifier object
  • Individual Object – All the personal information you know about your customer.
  • Contact Point Objects – Contact points (things like email, phone, address, device, and social) all have associated objects that can be used for identity resolution.
  • Party Identification Object –  Party identifier matching allows you to use your own customer-supplied identifiers.
  • Identity Resolution Rulesets – Allow you to configure match rules and reconciliation rules about a specific object, such as individual. 
  • Two types of rules that make up a ruleset:
    • Match Rules – Used to link together multiple records in a unified customer profile.
    • Reconciliation Rules – Determine the logic for data selection  
  • Match Rules match methods
    • Exact
    • Fuzzy
    • Normalized
  • While setting up new data stream Field Label and Field API Name can be edited
Salesforce Data Cloud Data Stream
  • Segement – Filter your data to create useful segments to understand, target, and analyze your customers.
  • Publish – Process of searching and building a segment based on the filter criteria. You can publish your segments on a chosen schedule or as needed.
  • Activation – Process of moving audience segments to an activation target.
  • Individuals: A specific person or customer from a specific data source, like Marketing Cloud.
  • Unified individual: A customer profile whose data has been merged based on multiple sources using Identity Resolution rules.
  • Once an attribute path has been selected in a container, it can’t be changed.
  • Customer Data Platform segments can be used in Journey Builder.
  • You need to go to Activations to activate a segment in Customer Data Platform

4.5 Segmentation and Insights 18% (11 Questions)

  • Segmentation in Customer Data Platform
  • 500 attributes can be enabled for Value Suggestion
  • Related attributes in the Attribute Library have a 1:Many relationship with the segment target
  • Calculated Insight can be used in Segmentation
  • Profile entity type can be used to “Segment On” in Segmentation
  • Attributes with text data type support Value Suggestion?

4.7 Act on Data 18% (11 Questions)

  • Creating a new Activation requires you to select Segment, Activation Target and Activation Membership
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New Activation Screen
  • Activated Segments found as Shared Data Extension in Marketing Cloud
  • Options available for automated batch publish and activation
    • 12 hours
    • 24 hours
  • Calculated Insights added to an Activation as Additional Attribute
  • Activation Target is used to define the location where you want to use your segment
  • Activation Targets are created before setting up an activation
  • There are three distinct classes of Data Cloud APIs:
    • Profile
    • Query
    • Calculated Insights

5. Other Notes

  • ANSI SOQL is used to configure Calculate Insights.
  • Identity Resolution Object
Identity Resolution Object
Identity Resolution Object
  • Options for the publishing schedule of segments
    • Don’t Refresh
    • 12 or 24 hours
  • Activation Targets includes a file format section. You can export in either a CSV or JSON formatted file to Amazon S3, per activation.
  • Customer Data Platform supports these content file formats:
    • CSV
    • TSV
  • Customer Data Platform supports these archive formats:
    • GZ
    • ZIP
  • Customer Data Platform supports these content delimiters:
    • , (comma)
    • \t (tab)
    • | (pipe)
    • ; (semicolon)
    • ^ (caret)
    • ¦ (broken Pipe)
    • \u0001
  • Some important Formulas
    • COALESCE – Returns the first value from the list that isn’t empty
    • CONCAT – Returns the values linked in a series

6. Salesforce Data Cloud Limits

6.1 General Guidelines and Limitations

WHAT FEATURE/FUNCTIONGUIDELINES/LIMITATIONS
Location of Data StorageData residency is supported in Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) only for customers whose Marketing Cloud instance is in EMEA (Stack 50).
Number of Anonymous ProfilesData Cloud Total Number of Known Profiles x5
Number of Customer Data Platform Permission Set Licenses500
Unsupported FeaturesData Kits: Marketing Cloud data streams aren’t installable.
Unsupported OrgsProfessional Edition orgs
Government Cloud

6.2 Activation Guidelines and Limitations

WHAT FEATURE/FUNCTIONGUIDELINES/LIMITATIONS
Scheduled Activation Publish FrequencyMinimum: 12 hours
Maximum: 24 hours
Number of Activation Targets10 external activation targets
Total Number of Attributes100
Number of Segments to an Activation Target1
Total Number of Activation TargetsCorporate and Enterprise Editions: 300 
Total Number of ActivationsTotal Number of Contracted Segment Publishes x 4

6.3 API Guidelines and Limitations

NOTE The concurrent request and query limits of Customer Data Platform APIs are independent from the concurrency limits governing the Salesforce platform APIs.

API Queries

WHAT FEATURE/FUNCTIONGUIDELINES/LIMITATIONS
Data Size of Query API Response8 MB
Maximum Timeout5 minutes
Total Number of Concurrent Queries5
Total Number of Queries per Day for Query API and Insights APICorporate and Enterprise Editions: 1,000
Total Number of Queries per Day for Profile APICorporate Edition: 10,000
Enterprise Edition: 50,000
Total Number of Queries per Month for Profile APICorporate Edition: 100,000
Enterprise Edition: 500,000

Ingest Bulk API Limits

WHAT FEATURE/FUNCTIONGUIDELINES/LIMITATIONS
API Usage LimitsVaries
Bulk Job Retention TimeMore than 7 days
Maximum Number of Files Per Job100 files
Maximum Payload Size150 MB
Number of Requests or Jobs Allowed per Hour20
Number of Concurrent Requests or Jobs Allowed at One Time5

Ingest Streaming API Limits

These limits and guidelines are for all ingest streaming API functions, including both Mobile and Web SDK streaming ingest API.

WHAT FEATURE/FUNCTIONGUIDELINES/LIMITATIONS
API Usage LimitsVaries
Expected Latency for Ingestion API15 minutes
Expected Latency for Mobile and Web SDKUser Profiles: 15 minutes
User Engagement: 2 minutes
Maximum Number of Records that can be Deleted via Streaming API Deletion200 records
Maximum Payload Size per Request200 KB
Total Number of Requests per Second Across All Ingestion API Object Endpoints250 requests

Profile API

WHAT FEATURE/FUNCTIONGUIDELINES/LIMITATIONS
Maximum Number of Records Returned per Call49,999
Total Number of Concurrent Requests Per Second5
Total Number of Fields per Record50

6.4 Calculated Insights Guidelines and Limitations

WHAT FEATURE/FUNCTIONGUIDELINES/LIMITATIONS
How Often Insights are RefreshedMultiple times a day
Maximum Calculated Insights Execution Time2 hours
Maximum Number of Nested Calculated Insights3
Maximum Number of Dimensions per Calculated Insight10
Maximum Number of Measures per Calculated Insight20
Total Number of Active Calculated InsightsCorporate and Enterprise Editions: 100 
Total Number of Calculated Insight Batch Runs per Year, per Tenant100,000
Total Number of Calculated Insights per Tenant100

6.5 Data Actions Guidelines and Limitations

WHAT FEATURE/FUNCTIONGUIDELINES/LIMITATIONS
Maximum Size of Payload per Firing50 KB
Total Number of Data Actions Generated per Tenant, per Minute100
Total Number of Data Actions per Tenant10
Total Number of Data Action Targets per Tenant3
Total Number of Data Attributes per Payload20
Total Number of Rules per Data Action10

6.6 Data Explorer Guidelines and Limitations

WHAT FEATURE/FUNCTIONGUIDELINES/LIMITATIONS
Total Number of Columns Queried at a Time10
Total Number of Rows Displayed per Page100

6.7 Data Ingestion Guidelines and Limitations

WHAT FEATURE/FUNCTIONGUIDELINES/LIMITATIONS
Maximum Number of Fields per Data Stream1,050
Maximum Number of Single Field Types in a Data Stream800
Total Data Size LimitCorporate and Enterprise Editions: Unlimited
Total Number of CRM Custom Objects20
Total Number of CRM orgs that can be Connected to Customer Data Platform5
Total Number of Data ModelsCorporate and Enterprise Editions: 7,500
Total Number of Data StreamsCorporate and Enterprise Editions: 5,000
Total Number of Marketing Cloud Data Extension Tables20
Total Number of Marketing Cloud Personalization (Interaction Studio) Datasets per Instance5

GCS and S3 Bulk Ingestion

WHAT FEATURE/FUNCTIONGUIDELINES/LIMITATIONS
Optimal Size per CSV file500 MB
Maximum Number of Files per Scheduled Run1,000
Maximum Size per Standard CSV File10 GB
Maximum Size per Compressed CSV File250 MB
Maximum Data Size for Upsert2 GB

6.8 Identity Resolution Guidelines and Limitations

WHAT FEATURE/FUNCTIONGUIDELINES/LIMITATIONS
Maximum Scheduled Job Frequency per RulesetOnce per day
Total Number of Identity Rulesets2 per primary Data Model Object

6.9 Segmentation Guidelines and Limitations

WHAT FEATURE/FUNCTIONGUIDELINES/LIMITATIONS
Total Number of Active SegmentsCorporate and Enterprise Editions: 9950
Total Number of Attributes with Value Suggestions500
Total Number of Concurrent Publishes per Hour20
Total Number of Filters50
Total Number of Months that Events are Queried24
Maximum Number of Scheduled Publishes per Segment per Day2

6.10 Streaming Insights Guidelines and Limitations

WHAT FEATURE/FUNCTIONGUIDELINES/LIMITATIONS
Aggregation Time WindowMinimum: 5 minutes
Maximum: 24 hours
Total Number of Dimensions10
Total Number of Measures5
Total Number of Streaming Insights5
Unsupported FeaturesStreaming insights aren’t available in segmentation or activation.
Salesforce Certified Data Cloud Consultant

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8 thoughts on “How to Pass Salesforce Certified Data Cloud Consultant Exam”

  1. Hi Dinesh, thanks for sharing these notes/ I have same question as Saloni asked above. Can we create a Data Cloud sandbox?

  2. Hi Dinesh,

    I am also preparing for the Data Cloud Accredited Professional exam and your blog is very helpful. I wanted to know if there is any way to create a data cloud trial org which will help me practice instead of just theoretical knowledge. A response will be appreciated.

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