System Architect Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

A global manufacturer uses Salesforce as a hub for Customer and Order visibility. Upstream systems (SAP and a custom OMS) publish Order updates every few seconds for millions of orders. Business requires near-real-time status on the Order record, but Salesforce must avoid record-locking and API limit breaches. Historical events must remain queryable for 7 years for audit. Which architecture best meets these requirements?

A financial services org must implement data residency controls: EU customer PII must not be stored outside the EU, while global service agents need a unified view. The company wants to minimize custom code and ensure strong governance around access, auditing, and sharing. Which approach is the best fit?

A B2B company implemented Enterprise Territory Management (ETM) with 25,000 territories and frequent realignments. After a realignment, nightly processes slow dramatically and users see inconsistent access for several hours. The current design runs a full territory assignment recalculation and shares recalculation for all Accounts nightly. Which change most improves performance and reduces access inconsistency while maintaining correct sharing?

A customer has multiple managed packages plus extensive custom development. Deployments to production frequently cause regressions due to hidden dependencies between metadata types, and rollback is slow. The company wants a scalable release governance model supporting multiple teams, parallel development, and reliable backout. Which strategy is the best recommendation?

An org uses Person Accounts and integrates with an external MDM that assigns a Global Party ID. The integration currently matches on email, causing duplicates when emails change. The business requires: (1) idempotent upserts, (2) ability to merge duplicates safely, and (3) preservation of the MDM ID as the system of record. Which design best meets these goals?

A healthcare provider must enforce least privilege access for internal users and third-party care coordinators. Records are highly sensitive and access must be justified by a treatment relationship that expires. The current model uses Role Hierarchy + OWD Private + manual sharing, but periodic audits reveal excessive access lingering after relationships end. What is the best architecture to meet compliance while minimizing operational overhead?

A large org reports intermittent "UNABLE_TO_LOCK_ROW" errors during peak hours when multiple integrations update Accounts and related custom objects. The integrations use parallel threads and perform multiple updates per Account within a short window. Which change is most likely to reduce lock contention without sacrificing throughput?

A company is migrating from a legacy CRM and wants to load 200 million historical activity records for analytics and limited on-record visibility. Users need to see the last 50 activities on Contact quickly, but analysts need full history for trend reporting. Storing all activity in Salesforce would exceed storage and degrade performance. Which solution best balances performance, cost, and user needs?

During an acquisition, a company must integrate two Salesforce orgs quickly. The target org has different data model semantics (e.g., 'Customer' vs 'Account'), conflicting picklists, and different sharing requirements. The business needs a unified customer service console within 90 days, but full data harmonization will take a year. Which approach is the most viable interim architecture?

A System Architect is reviewing an org where admins frequently create new fields and automation directly in production to meet urgent requests. The org has had multiple incidents caused by untested flows and conflicting validation rules. Leadership wants to improve stability while preserving agility. Which governance model is the best recommendation?