Survivorship rules for winning attribute values
How to pick the value that survives when sources disagree: trust, recency, completeness and frequency as criteria, Data 360 reconciliation rules (Source Priority, Most Frequent, Last Updated, Ignore Empty Values, object defaults and field overrides, tie-breakers), and what a Salesforce merge decides for you through the principal record.
Given a customer scenario, recommend approaches and techniques for consolidating data attributes from multiple sources. Discuss criteria and methodology for picking the winning attributes.
~6 min read · 6 practice questions ·
What the exam expects
- Pick the survivorship criterion (source trust, recency, completeness, frequency) that fits each attribute, and explain thresholds and weights as a methodology.
- Configure Data 360 reconciliation rules: Source Priority, Most Frequent, Last Updated, Ignore Empty Values, object defaults and field overrides, and their tie-breakers.
- State what reconciliation does not do: change sources, reconcile contact points or pick a value for every application.
- Choose the principal record in a Salesforce merge for the values users can't pick.
Key terms: survivorship (rules that decide which source value a consolidated record keeps); reconciliation rule (the Data 360 rule that picks one value for a single-value unified field); Source Priority (ranks data lake objects from most to least preferred); Ignore Empty Values (skips nulls when picking); principal record (the merge survivor whose hidden and read-only values are kept).
Key facts
- Detail
- Object-level default, overridable per field
- Detail
- Needs Last Modified Date mapped; ties alphabetical
- Detail
- Last updated value wins
- Detail
- Last updated value wins
- Detail
- Nulls never selected
- Detail
- Never updated by reconciliation
- Detail
- Not reconciled; all stay on the profile
- Detail
- Created By and Created Date from the oldest record
- Detail
- Account with site users must be principal to keep them
- When is Last Updated not available as a reconciliation rule?
- When does a Source Priority field rule fall back to recency?
- Why does choosing the principal still matter if users pick field values during a merge?
- What does Ignore Empty Values change for Source Priority?
The questions are free to read. Answers with their sources and self-grading are included with the pack.
Keep reading with the Platform Data Architect pack
- Core concepts
- Exam traps
- Worked scenario
The pack includes:
- All 21 lessons of the Platform Data Architect guide, with reading progress
- Interactive decision walks and step-by-step sequence steppers
- Inline practice questions and one-click topic practice (6 questions for this lesson)
- An official source cited for every claim
- An AI tutor that answers from the guide
- Unlimited timed practice exams