We have reached the max limit of custom fields in Opportunity object. We did a field analysis and deleted the unused fields, but still anticipate reaching the same stage in 6 months.

For long run, what is the best approach to create an extension object/table for opportunity object, where we can store the less frequently used fields.

Has anyone faced similar situation in their projects, if so what would be the best approach to handle it.

Attribution to: user5352

Possible Suggestion/Solution #1

You don't mention what Salesforce Edition your running on, so just to confirm these are the current limits per edition, so if your on a lower edition and hitting this limit, you may want to add this to a list of reasons to consider for an upgrade. For more details see here Salesforce Features and Editions

Approaches to extending information on objects

Without knowing more about the types fields and the use cases behind them its hard to give one single answer to this question, so I'll try and give some advice and thoughts to see if any of them perhaps fit with what your seeing as the drivers from your side.

• Fields that could be moved to related detail records? You may have fields on your object that are repeating in a series, for example Quote 1 Amount, Quote 2 Amount, Quote 3 Amount etc. If you then also have a Quote 1 Description etc set of fields the number of fields grows further. While this can be better in terms of storage costs (rows are charged at 2k regardless of fields), it can lead to an overley complex object, especially if not all fields are used by users. As such you may want to consider create a new Custom Object, called Quote for example, with Amount and Description fields and creating relationship between the two (perhaps master-detail).
• Fields that could be moved to related lookup records? You may find you have a section of fields that can be moved to another related object, for example something like an Opportunity Setup object for fields that determine how the Opportunity is handled in general. This can be a one to one relationship and you can insist that before records are allowed to be deleted from this object the related records (the Opportunity record) is also deleted, which helps enforce the extension object record is not deleted. This option does come with it the possibility of reusing the same field information against other Opportunity records as well, which maybe of benefit? Once you have your extension Custom Object, simply create a lookup to it from your Opportunity via a lookup field.

In terms of adopting these options, both carry retrospectively a cost in terms of scripts to move the data out of fields and into rows. Before you can then delete the original fields and obtain the benefit.

Attribution to: Andrew Fawcett
This content is remixed from stackoverflow or stackexchange. Please visit https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/32642