4 ms·

Salesforce often ends up filling this gap in organizations that can afford it, but often results in a technical debt of layman-designed schemas persisting long

Salesforce often ends up filling this gap in organizations that can afford it, but often results in a technical debt of layman-designed schemas persisting long into production. (cleaning up or directly working with SF data is an expensive nightmare in my experience even post-Heroku acquisition) You are correct that a modern MS Access alternative would certainly find its market.

snuxoll 10y ago
For simple needs Salesforce isn't even that expensive, we have around ~38 "App Cloud" licenses - that adds up to $950/mo to not deal with data scattered everywhere, not needing to waste my time designing a full CRUD app with security, managing a database server, etc. It helps to have an experienced Salesforce admin though, I love the "citizen developer" that Salesforce always preaches but you can run into a mess if you don't think your data model through like any other database. > cleaning up or directly working with SF data is an expensive nightmare in my experience even post-Heroku acquisition Plenty of decent sync products to make this not stink. We happily pay for DBAmp every year to keep all our data on-site so we can expose it to other users and to keep a backup of pruned data.
- dzhiurgis 10y ago
  Salesforce sells a lot of "best practices" that sometimes aren't, but so many young developers(and even architects) buy into. You are leaving out storage costs. There's a minimum record size and then per licence billing, something like $250/GB/month. If anyone needs some info/consulting - PM me via email in profile.
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    Storage costs are certainly something to be weary of, and something I have always hone through great efforts to minimize. We have just over 5GB of total storage in our org and are only using ~45MB after a year because we planned out model around both storage efficiency and a sane data model. You don't use fully normalized database designs in Salesforce if you can avoid it.

snuxoll 10y ago

For simple needs Salesforce isn't even that expensive, we have around ~38 "App Cloud" licenses - that adds up to $950/mo to not deal with data scattered everywhere, not needing to waste my time designing a full CRUD app with security, managing a database server, etc. It helps to have an experienced Salesforce admin though, I love the "citizen developer" that Salesforce always preaches but you can run into a mess if you don't think your data model through like any other database. > cleaning up or directly working with SF data is an expensive nightmare in my experience even post-Heroku acquisition Plenty of decent sync products to make this not stink. We happily pay for DBAmp every year to keep all our data on-site so we can expose it to other users and to keep a backup of pruned data.

dzhiurgis 10y ago
Salesforce sells a lot of "best practices" that sometimes aren't, but so many young developers(and even architects) buy into. You are leaving out storage costs. There's a minimum record size and then per licence billing, something like $250/GB/month. If anyone needs some info/consulting - PM me via email in profile.
- snuxoll 10y ago
  Storage costs are certainly something to be weary of, and something I have always hone through great efforts to minimize. We have just over 5GB of total storage in our org and are only using ~45MB after a year because we planned out model around both storage efficiency and a sane data model. You don't use fully normalized database designs in Salesforce if you can avoid it.