Designing Record Access for Enterprise Scale

Designing Record Access for Enterprise Scale
Introduction
Group Membership Operations and Sharing Recalculation
Object Relationships, Bulk Loading, and Sharing Recalculation
Implicit Sharing
Parent-Child Data Skew
Record-Level Locking
Takeaway: Tuning Data Relationships and Updates for Performance
Tools for Large-Scale Realignments
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Parent-Child Data Skew

Implicit sharing behaviors simplify the task of managing security for users. They handle the most common data access use cases without requiring additional roles, groups, and sharing rules to be configured. However, like data ownership skew, some parent-child configurations can slow the performance of large data loads and updates, and sometimes even of single-record operations.

A common configuration that can lead to poor performance is the association of a large number of child records (10,000 or more) with a single parent account. For example, a customer can have tens or hundreds of thousands of contacts generated by marketing campaigns or purchased from mailing lists—without any association to formal business accounts. If a contact is required to have an associated account, what's best for an administrator to do? It can be convenient to park all those unallocated contacts under a single dummy account until their real business value and relationship can be determined.

While this option seems reasonable, this kind of parent-child data skew can cause serious performance problems in the maintenance of implicit sharing.

For example, assume that you have 300,000 contacts all under the same account. A user with access to one of these contacts also has a parent implicit share in the account sharing table that gives the user access to that account. Now what happens if that user loses access to the contact?

In order to determine whether to remove the user's sharing to the account, Salesforce must scan all of the other 299,999 contacts to ensure that the user doesn’t have access to them either. This practice can become expensive if Salesforce is processing many visibility changes on these highly skewed accounts.