Understanding ownership skew

When a single user owns more than 10,000 records of an object, it is called data skew. This is sometimes done when organizations want to park unused data somewhere, or want to assign a dummy user to own many records for a particular object. This practice may cause performance issues if those users are moved around the role hierarchy or if they are moved into or out of a role or group that is the source group for a sharing rule. The reason this is an issue is if a change is made to the sharing of a record, Salesforce must move a large number of entries into the sharing tables, which can take a long time and lock the records in that object. Locking the records would give other users trying to edit these affected records an error if they attempt to work with one of the records during the calculation.

There are a few ways to help remedy this issue:

• Distribute ownership of records access to a greater number of users. This will reduce the number...