Map Salesforce External Object Fields to Snowflake Data Types
External object fields can be mapped to Snowflake data table columns with scalar types such as strings and numbers. External object fields can’t be mapped to columns containing complex or semi-structured data types such as a variant, object, or array.
Required Editions
| Available in: both Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience |
Available in: Developer Edition Available for an extra cost in: Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited Editions |
This table details the mappings between column types in Snowflake and external object field types in Salesforce.
| Snowflake Data Type | Salesforce External Object Field Type |
|---|---|
| BOOLEAN | Checkbox |
| NUMBER, DECIMAL, NUMERIC, INT, INTEGER, BIGINT, SMALLINT, TINYINT, BYTEINT, FLOAT, FLOAT4, FLOAT8, DOUBLE, DOUBLE PRECISION, REAL | Number For simplicity, Snowflake exposes all numeric columns in a consistent way that maps to Number fields in Salesforce. To align fields across Snowflake and Salesforce, match the precision and scale carefully based on your data and the column definition. |
| STRING, TEXT, VARCHAR, CHAR, CHARACTER | Text, Text Area, Text Area (Long), Phone, Email, URL, Picklist, and Picklist (Multi-Select) If you map Snowflake data to Picklist or Picklist (Multi-Select) field types in Salesforce, ensure that values are in a picklist value set and that multi-select picklist values are separated by a semicolon. Any Snowflake column defined with a maximum length greater than 255 (for example, VARCHAR(256) or VARCHAR(16777216)) is automatically mapped to the Text Area (Long) type during sync. |
| DATE | Date |
| TIME | Time |
| DATETIME, TIMESTAMP, TIMESTAMP_LTZ, TIMESTAMP_NTZ, TIMESTAMP_TZ | Date/Time Data stored in DATETIME and TIMESTAMP fields without a timezone in Snowflake is interpreted in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) in Salesforce. Salesforce users see these dates in their locale’s timezone. |
| GEOGRAPHY | Text |
This mapping strategy is for Snowflake data types to some of the common field types of external objects in Salesforce.
- A CHAR, STRING, or VARCHAR data type that represents a Phone, URL, Text, Text Area, Text Area (Long), or Email is stored as the corresponding Salesforce field type.
- A CHAR, STRING, or VARCHAR data type that represents a Picklist is rendered as Salesforce-defined enumeration values. For Picklist (Multi-Select), it’s stored as semicolon-separated values of the selected choices.
- A decimal data type that represents a percent is stored as a numeric value of the percent type.
- A decimal data type that represents currency is stored as a numeric value using the currency symbol configured for the Salesforce org.
