Custom database development in the cloud

Before diving more deeply into database application development with Force.com, it’s useful to review the platform’s advantages at the highest level. Force.com is cloud-based, which means you don’t need server hardware or a data center to perform database customization or any other aspect of database application development. With just a notebook and a Web browser, custom database development power is literally at your fingertips.

You also don’t need a Ph.D. in programming for database application development on Force.com. If you’re at home with intuitive point-and-click tools―and these days, who isn’t?―you can easily create custom objects and fields for dates, numbers, text, currency, pick lists, checklists, and more.

Database customization with the greatest of ease

Similarly, it takes just clicks to add relationships, formula fields, validation rules, reporting, tagging, auditing, and searches using your choice of Force.com’s Web-based custom database development environment or Eclipse-based IDE. All database application development services are tightly integrated with the Java-like Force.com code, Apex, which includes a dedicated syntax for invoking searches and iterating over results.

When you use Force.com for database application development, you don’t need to be concerned about performance tuning, backup and recovery strategies, and archive logging. Just perform your database customization and we’ll handle everything else securely in the cloud.

Let’s not overlook another advantage of Force.com for database application development: With your data model as a guide, the platform automatically creates a rich user interface. Force.com makes individually tailoring this UI as easy as it makes database customization: Just use our drag-and-drop page layout editor.

Exploring database application development with Force.com

The function of “data persistence” is central to many applications, and the Force.com database makes up the platform’s persistence layer. The process of database application development involves creating persistent objects using the Web-based Force.com Setup menu environment. The platform then automatically generates a user interface (UI) around these objects. In addition to custom database development, Force.com lets you build tagging, reporting, and a host of other related functions into your apps. As mentioned previously, database customization services are closely tied to Force.com’s native code (Apex).

Before undertaking database application development, it’s helpful to understand the basic structure of the Force.com database, the many data types supported, and the terminology used.

The fundamentals of hands-on database application development

In addition to automatic UI generation and point-and-click tools, Force.com has another database application development capability that’s especially noteworthy: Instead of performing custom database development using foreign keys, you work with meaningful and more abstract relationships.

When you’re doing database application development with a relational database, you store data in tables, each of which contains a number of columns of a specific data type. Information resides in the rows of each table. As part of the database application development process, you can create relationships among various tables by means of primary and foreign keys. For example, you can map the rows in one table to rows in another.

In contrast, the Force.com database uses objects to store data. Although objects have all the functionality of tables and more, there are differences that bear directly on custom database development. Objects are made up of fields. When you perform database application development, you associate or relate objects to other objects using relationship fields that map records in one object to records in another. Metadata defines an object’s attributes, and information gets stored in records of the object. When you create an object using Force.com code during the course of database application development, it’s called an sObject to distinguish it from instances of Apex classes.

Field types and their role in database application development

• Non-relational field types. In database application development with Force.com, all fields inside an object need to be defined as a specific data type. These include Auto Number, Checkbox, Date or Date/Time, Number, Email, Phone and URL, Picklist and Multi-Select Picklists, Text and Text Areas, Currency, and Formula.
  
  If you already know your way around database application development, most of these fields will be familiar―many relational databases use Auto Number, Text, and Number. The Formula data type is somewhat different: In database application development with Force.com, it gets its value from a supplied formula expression. Whenever any source fields undergo change, the Formula field is updated. And when your application displays Checkbox, Email, URL, and Phone fields within the automatically generated UI, some automatic formatting capabilities are included to simply database customization.


• Relational field types. As already described, in database application development with Force.com, you implement record relationships differently than with relational databases. Rather than use keys to define relationships, you perform custom database development with relationship fields. A relationship field stores the ID of the parent record and gives you the option of supplying user interface representations in both the parent and child records.

Database customization using relationship fields

You can define two kinds of relationship fields in database application development:

• To associate one object with another, you create a Lookup Relationship that lets you visually and programmatically navigate from records in one object to the related records in another.
• The other type of relationship field used in Force.com database application development is the Master-Detail Relationship. This field defines a specific kind of relationship between one object (the child or “detail”) and another object (the parent or “master”).

For more information on database application development with Force.com, please visit our wiki page on Database Services. You’ll find overviews, articles, and presentations on custom database development plus reference material on the finer details of database customization.