Why Do Record IDs Contain 15 Characters in Salesforce and 18 in the Destination?

Question

Why do record IDs contain 15 characters in Salesforce and 18 in the destination?

Environment

Connector: Salesforce

Answer

Salesforce represents records with a 15-character, case-sensitive ID in the native platform. However, to avoid issues with case-insensitive applications, all calls to Salesforce's API return an 18-digit, case-safe record ID. As a result, the same record may appear with a 15-character ID in Salesforce and an 18-character ID in the destination.

See Salesforce's Field Types documentation for more information.