Materialisation errors on Salesforce tables

When materializing Salesforce tables, or views involving a Salesforce table, you may see the following error:

Next Exception: ERROR: value too long for type character varying(50)0

The reason for this is a mismatch between the table's metadata reported by Salesforce and the actual data. In some cases, Salesforce describes a column to be of type varchar(50), although this column does contain strings longer than 50 characters.

To work around this issue, you may create a new view, which is based on the original Salesforce table. This view must cast the erroneous column to its correct maximum length. Then, materialize that view instead of the original Salesforce table and use only this view in all further queries.

CREATE VIEW salesforce_data_model.customer__c AS

SELECT CAST(Name AS varchar(500)) AS Name

FROM salesforce.customer__c