Salesforce Data Cloud is rapidly emerging as the foundation for unifying customer data across Salesforce’s product suite and unifying diverse data sets from various platforms into a single customer view. Like other Salesforce platforms, Data Cloud has its own vocabulary of acronyms. In this new Salesforce Data Cloud Acronym Guide, Salesforce MVP Eliot Harper helps all users, from beginners to experts, to quickly decode and comprehend the terminology used in this powerful platform.

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Artificial Intelligence (AI)
A branch of computer science that focuses on creating systems capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. These tasks include learning from experience, understanding natural language, recognizing patterns, solving problems, and making decisions.

American National Standards Institute (ANSI)
A private non-profit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. Data Cloud uses ANSI SQL, a standardized version of SQL approved by ANSI.

Application Programming Interface (API)
A set of rules and protocols that allows different software applications to communicate with each other. APIs define the methods and data formats that applications can use to request and exchange information, enabling integration and interaction between different systems.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
A widely adopted cloud platform offered by Amazon. It provides a variety of on-demand cloud computing services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, as well as machine learning, and artificial intelligence. AWS enables businesses and developers to build, deploy, and manage applications and services without having to manage physical hardware. It is known for its scalability, flexibility, and reliability, catering to a wide range of industries and use cases.

Bring Your Own Lake (BYOL)
BYOL data federation enables secure, near real-time access to data in supported external data lake and data warehouse platforms using zero-copy integration, without the need to replicate and store data in Data Cloud.

Bring Your Own Large Language Model (BYOLLM)
Enables an external OpenAI-based Large Language Model (LLM) to create generative AI models and generate prompt responses using objects in Data Cloud.

Bring Your Own Model (BYOM)
An AI development tool in Einstein Studio that allows data analysts and data scientists to access data in DLOs and DMOs using a zero-copy approach, then create predictions by building AI models in supported BYOM platforms.

Calculated Insight (CI)
A calculated insight is derived from scheduled batch data and can be used to build insights from single, multi-dimensional or time-dimensional calculations. In turn, calculated insights can be used across business intelligence, segmentation, activation, and personalization use cases. This insight type is applied after data harmonization and unification, and enables the entire data model (all DMOs) to be queried, with a broad historical lookback period, right back to data inception.

Calculated Insight Object (CIO)
The result of a calculated insight which is a data model object generated after processing the calculated insight. CIOs can be viewed in Data Explorer.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
A technology system designed to manage a company’s interactions and relationships with current and potential customers. The primary goal of CRM is to improve business relationships, streamline processes, and enhance profitability. CRMs are used to organize, automate, and synchronize sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support.

Comma-Separated Values (CSV)
A plain text file format used for storing and exchanging tabular data. Each line in a CSV file represents a record, and each record consists of fields separated by commas.

Data Lake Object (DLO)
The product of a DSO (and any transformation), providing a storage object for users to prepare their data by mapping fields and applying additional transformations. This object is a physical store and is the first object that is available for inspection in the platform.

Data Model Object (DMO)
A virtualized grouping of mapped DLO fields. This object is used to access and operationalize data, by building segments, calculated insights and queries. A DMO can have a standard or custom relationship with other DMOs and provide a canonical data model with pre-defined attributes, which are presented as standard objects. Custom DMOs can also be created.

Data Source Object (DSO)
A physical, temporary staging data store that contains the data in its raw, native file format from the data stream. Formulas can be applied to perform minor transformations on DSO fields at time of data ingestion.

Extract, Transform, Load (ETL)
A process used in data warehousing and data integration to consolidate data from multiple sources into a centralized database or data warehouse. The ETL process ensures that data is properly cleaned, formatted, and made ready for analysis and reporting.

Fully Qualified Key (FQK)
A composite key consisting of a source key and a key qualifier, to avoid key conflicts when primary keys from different source systems are harmonized in the platform data model.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
A suite of cloud computing services provided by Google. It offers a range of services for computing, storage, data analytics, machine learning, and application development. GCP enables businesses and developers to build, deploy, and scale applications and websites on the same infrastructure that Google uses for its end-user products.

Google Cloud Storage (GCS)
A service within Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that provides scalable and durable object storage for unstructured data. It is designed to handle large amounts of data and offers features like high availability, security, and data lifecycle management. GCS is suitable for a wide range of use cases including data archiving, backup, content delivery, and data lakes.

Hashed Email (HEM)
An email address that has been processed through a cryptographic hashing function to convert it into a unique, fixed-length string of characters. This process is used to protect the original email address while still allowing it to be used for various purposes, such as matching and identifying users across different systems without exposing their actual email addresses. Hashing ensures that the email address is anonymized and secure, as it is not easily reversible. Common types of hashing algorithms for HEM include MD5, SHA-1 and SHA-256.

Identity Resolution (IR)
The process of building a single representation of an individual from different datasets, unifying multiple profile data points to create a unified individual profile.

Java Database Connectivity (JDBC)
An API in the Java programming language that defines how a client can access a database. It provides a standard method for Java applications to interact with various databases, enabling developers to write database applications in Java that can connect to a wide range of databases, while abstracting the underlying database-specific details. A JDBC driver provides a connection to Data Cloud for querying DLOs and DMOs using external database tools.

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)
A lightweight data interchange format for describing structured data that is based on JavaScript object syntax. JSON is self-describing and easy for humans to read and write, and easy for machines to parse and generate. JSON is widely used for exchanging data, particularly in web applications.

Mobile Advertising Identifier (MAID)
A unique identifier assigned to a mobile device that helps advertisers track and target ads to individual users. It is designed to provide an anonymous and resettable way to identify a user’s device across different apps and services, facilitating personalized advertising while protecting user privacy.

Pretty Good Privacy (PGP)
A data encryption and decryption program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication. PGP is widely used for securing emails, files, and data. It uses a combination of symmetric and asymmetric cryptography to ensure data security and integrity. Data Cloud supports PGP file encryption and decryption for SFTP connections.

Simple Storage Service (S3)
Amazon S3, or Amazon Simple Storage Service, is a service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that offers object storage capabilities. S3 can store any type of object, making it versatile for a range of uses including file storage for internet applications, backups, disaster recovery, data archives, data lakes, and hybrid cloud storage.

Software Development Kit (SDK)
A collection of software tools, libraries, documentation, code samples, processes, and guides for developers. SDKs simplify the software development process by providing the necessary building blocks to build applications more efficiently and effectively.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC)
Former product name for Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement. ‘SFMC’ is used in Data Cloud as a name prefix for system-generated DLOs and associated data streams by the Marketing Cloud Engagement starter data bundle, to store engagement data for outbound marketing activities.

Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP)
A secure version of the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) that facilitates the transfer of files over a network. SFTP ensures the security and integrity of data during transfer by using the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol to encrypt both the command and data channels.

Structured Query Language (SQL)
A standardized programming language used for managing and manipulating relational databases. SQL is used to communicate with a database to perform various operations, such as querying data, updating records, deleting records, and creating or modifying database structures.

Secure Shell (SSH)
A cryptographic network protocol used to securely operate network services over an unsecured network. It provides a secure channel over an unsecured network by using a client-server architecture, encrypting the data transferred between the client and the server. SFTP uses SSH for connection encryption.