In this article, we are going to cover the following -
- What is a Sandbox
-Types of Salesforce Sandboxes
- Difference between different types of Sandboxes
- How to create a Sandbox
What is a Sandbox -
We all are aware of the application lifecycle management i.e. ALM. When talking about the sandboxes, we think of the environment as a glue of ALM. We design and create them to support the alm processes. Sandbox is an essential part of alm in salesforce. An environment provided by salesforce as safe space, for testing different configurations, setups or newly developed apps is known as a "salesforce sandbox". We can say it's a simulation of the production environment to some extent, because the changes made in production orgs do not impact the sandbox and vice versa. This means the data does not sync between these orgs. These environments don't have any live users or data.
Licenses for each sandbox type need to be purchased. Also, multiple licenses of each type can be purchased.
Types of salesforce sandboxes -
In salesforce we have four different types of sandboxes depending on what they can offer -
1. Partial sandbox,
2. Full copy sandbox,
3. Developers sandbox and
4. Developer Pro sandbox
Partial copy sandbox : This sandbox is a copy of our production orgs configuration (including metadata) and a sample of production orgs data (small portion of total data). We can call this a QA sandbox and this sandbox is used by QA for running their tests like integration testing, UAT testing etc.
Partial Copy sandbox by default contains following -
1. Reports
2. Dashboards
3. Price books
4. Products
5. Apps
6. Customizations under Setup (including metadata)
Partial Copy sandboxes can additionally include production's standard and custom object records, Documents, and Attachments up to 5GB and a limit of 10,000 records per chosen object, as specified in the sandbox template.
Full copy sandbox - As the name suggests full copy sandbox is an exact replica of our production org in terms of data, metadata, object records etc. This sandbox is also known as a staging instance. These sandboxes are also used for performance testing and load testing.
Developers sandbox - It is an identical copy of Production Metadata. It does not contain any data from production. It is designed for development and unit testing activity for the individual developers.
Developer pro sandbox - Just like dev sandbox, this sandbox is also an identical copy of Production Metadata without any data from production. It is designed for development and unit testing activity for the individual developers. However, the difference lies in the data space and the file space offered by it.
Difference between sandboxes -
Steps to create a sandbox -
1. From Setup -> Navigate to quick find box -> type ‘sandboxes’
2. Select ‘New sandbox’ button
3. Give the name to your sandbox -
4. Select the type of sandbox you want -> click next
5. Click Create button -
and the sandbox gets created. When the sandbox is ready for use, we receive a notification email that your sandbox is ready for use.
