Skip to main content

Why a SQL Course matters in a world with AI

SQL for Salesforce

This week, Salesforce Ben released new SQL course for Salesforce that aims to introduce a SQL learning path aimed at professionals who work in Salesforce. My goal for the course was to provide technical training from the perspective where data literacy and translating business questions is the driver to write SQL. In my course, I lean into LLMs, specifically ChatGPT, and even introduce how I use ChatGPT to assist debugging. A the end, anyone who takes the course will learn their way around Snowflake and have a lab built for funnel analytics.

Large Language Models (LLMs), are make it easier than ever to write SQL and Python. Some have made bold claims that learning how to code wont be necessary in the future. Despite advances in LLMs, SQL remains a vital skill in the data-driven world.

Writing SQL without LLM

  • Lots of time consumed troubleshooting and debugging SQL
  • Reverse engineering other’s SQL
  • Manually typing documentation
  • Understanding how functions work
  • Formatting data to use in expressions
  • Understanding data structure and meta data

Using LLMs while Writing SQL

  • Paste your code and the error and let LLMs point out syntax issues or how to correct errors
  • Break down and explain SQL structure and purpose
  • Auto-document SQL
  • Relate functions to your existing knowledge
  • Auto-prepare expressions with correct syntax
  • Explain meta data structure

What you get out of learning SQL course for Salesforce

1. General understanding – Fundamental SQL skills

AI tools like LLMs can write SQL queries, but without a solid grasp of SQL fundamentals, it’s challenging to evaluate or optimize those queries effectively. SQL is more than just a query language; it’s about understanding how data is structured, how relationships are built, and how to extract meaningful insights from databases. SQL gives you the foundation to translate questions into queries and ensures that you’re not just a passive consumer of AI-generated code.

2. Contextual Awareness

While LLMs are powerful, they might not fully grasp the nuances of your specific database environment or the business rules that govern your data. Learning SQL allows you to tailor queries to your unique context, ensuring the results are accurate and aligned with your business needs. This contextual understanding is something that AI, despite its advancements, can’t fully replicate.

3. Collaboration with Data Teams

SQL acts as a common language in the data world, bridging the gap between business professionals and technical teams. When you understand SQL, you can communicate more effectively with data engineers, analysts, and other stakeholders. Understanding the data structures needed for analytics also increases your awareness as you alter the Salesforce data model. At the end of the day, having SQL in your toolkit makes you a more valuable contributor.

4. Troubleshooting and Optimization

Even the best AI tools can generate inefficient queries that may impact system performance. By learning SQL, you gain the ability to troubleshoot, optimize, and refine these queries, ensuring they run efficiently and deliver the desired results.

5. Future-Proofing Your Career

SQL skills continue to be in high demand, with job opportunities in this field projected to grow significantly over the next decade. As DataCloud takes off, employers will value SQL proficiency, as it’s a core skill for data cloud related roles when you need to “bring your own data warehouse.”

More about SQL course for Salesforce

What You’ll Learn:

  • Data Query Language (DQL): Focus on querying and analyzing data.
  • Salesforce Integration: Learn how SQL concepts align with Salesforce SOQL.
  • Practical Skills: Hands-on exercises to build familiarity and proficiency.

Applied LLMs: Prompt Design Framework for Great Results

Prompt Engineering

AI Prompt Design Importance and Challenges

The design of prompts plays a pivotal role in determining the success and efficacy of large language model chat bots. Prompt design encompasses various elements that contribute to optimal AI performance whereby having clear and concise instructions improves the result. One of the frameworks that encapsulates these essential elements is RISEN, which stands for Role, Instruction, Steps, End Goal, and Narrowing.

Let’s dive into each component of RISEN, explore its importance, and learn how to produce better results when you follow best practices from providers like ChatGPT,

Using RISEN for Effective AI Prompt Design

I first learned about RISEN while searching for formal prompt design frameworks mostly because there was limited credible guidance. The origins of RISEN can be credited back to Kyle Balmer on his promptentrepreneur TikTok channel. In the world of data and analytics, we have used LLMs to translate and convert business and data requirements:

R.I.S.E.N Prompt Components

Role: Ensures AI understands the role it needs to play for accurate responses.
Example: Act as a data consultant proposing a comprehensive strategy for implementing Salesforce Data Cloud in an organization.

Instruction: Provides clear directives to guide the AI’s actions.
Example: “Develop a proposal outlining the strategy, benefits, and implementation plan for Salesforce Data Cloud.”

Steps: Outlines the specific steps or components to follow.
Example:

  1. Start with an executive summary explaining the purpose and importance of Salesforce Data Cloud.
  2. Detail the key benefits of adopting Salesforce Data Cloud.
  3. Outline the step-by-step implementation plan, including data migration, integration, and user training.
  4. Provide a timeline and budget estimate for the implementation.
  5. Conclude with potential challenges and mitigation strategies.

End Goal: Defines the desired outcome of the prompt.
Example: Create a comprehensive proposal that convinces stakeholders of the value and feasibility of implementing Salesforce Data Cloud, ultimately leading to project approval and execution.

Narrowing: Sets constraints or requirements to refine the output.
Example: The proposal should be 2,000-2,500 words, use professional language, and include relevant data and case studies to support the arguments.

Final RISEN Prompt

The final compiled prompt looks like the following. Give it a shot in your AI Chatbot of choice!

Act as a Salesforce consultant proposing a comprehensive strategy for implementing Salesforce Data Cloud in an organization. 

Develop a proposal outlining the strategy, benefits, and implementation plan for Salesforce Data Cloud. 

Start with an executive summary explaining the purpose and importance of Salesforce Data Cloud.

Detail the key benefits of adopting Salesforce Data Cloud.

Outline the step-by-step implementation plan, including data migration, integration, and user training.

Provide a timeline and budget estimate for the implementation.

Conclude with potential challenges and mitigation strategies.

Create a comprehensive proposal that convinces stakeholders of the value and feasibility of implementing Salesforce Data Cloud, ultimately leading to project approval and execution.

The proposal should be 2,000-2,500 words, use professional language, and include relevant data and case studies to support the arguments. 

Challenges in AI Prompt Design

Despite its importance, AI prompt design presents several challenges…

Context Sensitivity: Designing prompts that are contextually relevant and sensitive to user intent can be challenging. Not all AI chatbots are built alike and the underlying data and context can vary.

Balancing Simplicity and Complexity: Finding the right balance between simple prompts for user understanding and complex prompts for detailed interactions is challenging. For example, in a financial planning AI, balancing prompts that are easy to understand for general users while providing in-depth analysis for financial experts requires careful design.

Dynamic Interaction: Designing prompts that adapt dynamically to user input and feedback can be complex. For instance, in a recommendation system, prompts need to evolve based on user preferences and interactions to deliver personalized recommendations effectively. For example, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been designed per chat session to maintain continuity over time.

Multimodal Interaction: Integrating multiple modes of interaction, such as voice, text, and imagery, into prompt design adds complexity and opportunity for increasing context beyond what you can type. “A picture is worth a million words” which holds true for multi-modal generative AI.

Cultural Sensitivity: Designing prompts that are culturally sensitive and inclusive requires consideration of diverse user backgrounds and preferences. For example, in a language translation AI, prompts need to account for linguistic nuances and cultural differences to avoid misunderstandings.

Despite these challenges, the RISEN framework provides a structured approach for interating with large language models while optimizing prompt design.

Bottom Line on Prompt Design

While crafting prompts for AI can be tricky, the RISEN framework and consistent approach to build good prompts. By focusing on role, instruction, and other key principles, you can confidently tackle any large language model chat bot and extract maximum value!

New ChatGPT Store is Proving Ground for DataTools Pro GPT

DataTools Pro GPT

OpenAI unveiled a new ChatGPT Store and teams subscription, further asserting their dominance in mass adoption of Generative AI. The new OpenAI GPT Store is rolling out after a huge surge of creativity from a community of creators. There are over 3 million custom GPTs. OpenAI is initially rolling out this new store to ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Enterprise users.

ChatGPT Store
Photo Credit- OpenAI.com

Our First New ChatGPT Store Release: Marketing Metrics DataTools Pro

To participate in this exciting GPT Store launch, we released Marketing Metrics DataTools Pro GPT. This was a great opportunity to use our own curated metrics database. Participating in the excitement and initial launch of ChatGPT store is a great opportunity to safely test. Additionaly, we are using our own GPT for internal product marketing competency, design and rollout of DataTools Pro metrics glossary.

New ChatGPT Teams

The second exciting announcement from OpenAI is the release of ChatGPT Teams. For $30/month, this license provides an affordable solution for any business. We ae betting big on collaborative AI and AI agents. These ChatGPT releases are not the point of arrival for AI mass adoption. It is one point along a path to help you boost adoption, understanding, and competency with AI.

Keeping Pulse on AI Agents Advancements

At DataTools Pro, our vision and role is to help curate critical semantic data in the form of intelligent metrics glossary. When you adopt AI agents, creating awareness fluency in your business terminology is what will make or break your AI experience. If you ae trying to make sense of OpenAI ChatGPT, Azure GPT, or Salesforce GPT we are here to help you de-mystify and plan accordingly. Our team is working to simultaneously support them all!

DataTools Pro Beta3 is Here for the Holidays

DataTools for the Holidays

Just in time for the holidays, we hit our final beta release milestone before we officially launch DataTools Pro in early 2024! Our approach to product is release early and often so we can get feedback and incorporate it into our roadmap. DataTools Pro milestone to exit beta is our release into the Salesforce App exchange. We look forward to formally delivering a webinar in January to celebrate our launch. We have a jam packed roadmap to deliver in 2024. We can’t wait to help connect your Salesforce, data, and analytics teams and accelerate your data cloud initiatives.

Dec LinkedIn Newsletter: DataTools Pro Holiday Special

Salesforce Entity Relationship Views

A simple and effective tool to classify your Salesforce objects, our new views features allows you to organize objects and create custom entity prelateship diagrams aligned to business topics, organizations, and initiatives.

Data Tools Object and ERD Views

ARTICLE: Salesforce Entity Relationship Diagrams Makes Visual Storytelling Simple

Metrics Enhancements

We have continued to button up our metrics glossary tools to simplify the the process for managing metrics and KPI glossaries and their lineage to Salesforce dashboards and reports. We added support for custom links.

Improved Metrics Bulk Batch Import

Bulk Editing Metrics Records

Fine Grained User Permissions and Sharing

In preparation for team-based work in DataTools Pro, we added fine grained permissions. Next, we are working to refine the experience and standardize roles to make permissions and sharing simple.

Managing User Permissions and Sharing

DataTools Metrics API

An impotent aspect of DataTools Pro is not only automating most aspects of metrics glossary creation and management, but also securely distributing it across your enterprise. We have been quietly experimenting with our own DataTools API to build new integrations. Those will come in the form of add-ons, open source projects, and direct integrations in 2024.

ARTICLE: Using DataTools Pro to Create New Microsoft Copilot Studio Custom Actions

Support and User Onboarding Resources

We have added contextual help, more documentation, and new support engagement options to work with our team. This is just the start as we work on guided onboarding videos to help deliver best practices from our team and other users.

New Community and Social Resources

DataTools Pro Flash Newsletter
Join our monthly newsletter on LinkedIn

Join us on Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/datatoolspro/

New DataTools LinkedIn Page
https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/datatools-pro/

Coming in January!

Our development is razor focused on self-service onboarding. Additionally, we have some very exciting, novel features for our metrics glossary that will go into private preview. Our first webinar to officially launch DataToolsPro and DataToolsPro.com is also planned for January. We look forward working with our early adopter beta users to deliver overwhelming incremental value to your Salesforce data cloud initiatives for 2024!

Salesforce Entity Relationship Diagrams Makes Visual Storytelling Simple

Salesforce ERD

One of the most useful tools in the admin or data professional’s toolkit are Salesforce entity relationship diagrams. Understanding conceptual and physical data models is difficult enough. A business stakeholder responsible for sales, marketing, and revenue typically has little interest in the Salesforce data model. When information coming out of Salesforce is incorrect, sometimes you need to revisit your existing data model.

Bringing Salesforce admin, data and business professionals together, sometimes a conceptual entity relationship diagram is very useful to algin to the same level of understanding to make the right forward decision. To help explain and prioritize data work for a client, I recently used our entity relationship diagram to pinpoint and explain the root cause of reporting problems.

Salesforce entity relationship diagrams

Real World Lead Attribution Use Case with Salesforce ERD

Lead attribution is one of the most important and challenging aspects of running your “got to market” stack. To do so requires attention to data consistency and quality. One of our customers had an ambitious and practical approach to connects Leads, Accounts, and Opportunities with a junction object called “Vintage”. The ability to automatically track a lead vintage (when the lead enters the funnel), is very useful to report funnel conversion and lifetime value. Reports for revenue and lifetime value by lead source is important for planning and budgeting independent of campaign activity.

To communicate the issue, I used the following DataTools Pro ERD Diagram to demonstrate the additional data relationships that were maintained. Additionally, I explained how existing reporting requirements could easily be achieved without the vintage object. The following is the exact picture I painted to describe the specific linkage that was effectively broken in the Lead Attribution Funnel.

Salesforce Attribution Diagram

Resolution with Empirical Proof

There were some objections to remove the Vintage object. During the meeting, I clicked to demonstrate where those data relationships are maintained. It was very effective to satisfy most objections in real time.

There was one objection we had to clear to deprecate the Vintage object. Using historical data analysis I discovered the Vintage objection use case occurred 1 in every 500 opportunities which made it a true edge case. Sometimes you engineer a solution to account for anticipated scenarios that rarely occur in real life; this was one of those cases.

The consensus was the vintage object and all of the processes needed to maintain it could be deprecated. Rather than trying to accomplish detailed lead attribution from the lead object, campaign and campaign members are used to capture clients that enter the funnel multiple times from multiple channels.

How to Build a Salesforce entity relationship diagrams for Free

Salesforce provides an out of the entity diagram for Salesforce administrators to visualize and manage the Salesforce data model. I find them useful for administration but not for sharing and distribution.

Build better, easier to visualize ERDs with DataTools Pro: Our desire to build a better ERD for Salesforce led us to create ERDs. Here are some of reasons you may want to check out the free diagraming capabilities we offer:

  • Simpler, minimal design
  • Exportable to single page document (SVG)
  • Connected directly to Salesforce
  • Custom views aligned to business topics and tech modules.