Skip to main content

Big Objects - Introduction

Big Objects

A big object stores and manages massive amounts of data on the Salesforce platform. You can archive data from other objects or bring massive datasets from outside systems into a big object to get a full view of your customers. Clients and external systems use a standard set of APIs to access big object data. A big object provides consistent performance, whether you have 1 million records, 100 million, or even 1 billion. This scale gives a big object its power and defines its features.

There are two types of big objects.
  • Standard big objects—Objects defined by Salesforce and included in Salesforce products. FieldHistoryArchive is a standard big object that stores data as part of the Field Audit Trail product. Standard big objects are available out of the box and cannot be customized.
  • Custom big objects—New objects that you create to store information unique to your org. Custom big objects extend the functionality that Lightning Platform provides. For example, if you’re building an app to track product inventory, create a custom big object called HistoricalInventoryLevels to track historical inventory levels for analysis and future optimizations. This implementation guide is for configuring and deploying custom big objects.

Custom Big Object Use Cases

  • Auditing and tracking—Track and maintain a long-term view of Salesforce or product usage for analysis or compliance purposes.
  • Historical archive—Maintain access to historical data for analysis or compliance purposes while optimizing the performance of your core CRM or Lightning Platform applications.

Differences Between Big Objects and Other Objects

Because a big object can store data on an unlimited scale, it has different characteristics than other objects, like sObjects. Big objects are also stored in a different part of the Lightning Platform.
Big ObjectssObjects
Horizontally scalable distributed databaseRelational database
Non-transactional databaseTransactional database
Hundreds of millions or even billions of recordsMillions of records
These big object behaviors ensure a consistent and scalable experience.
  • Big objects support only object and field permissions, not regular or standard sharing rules.
  • Features like triggers, flows, processes, and the Salesforce app are not supported on big objects.
  • When you insert an identical big object record with the same representation multiple times, only a single record is created so that writes can be idempotent. This behavior is different from an sObject, which creates a record for each request to create an object.

Considerations When Using Big Objects

  • To define a big object or add a field to a custom big object, use either Metadata API or Setup.
  • Big objects support custom Lightning and Visualforce components rather than standard UI elements home pages, detail pages, list views, and so on.
  • You can create up to 100 big objects per org. The limits for big object fields are similar to the limits on custom objects and depend on your org’s license type.
  • You can’t use Salesforce Connect external objects to access big objects in another org.
  • Big objects don't support encryption. If you archive encrypted data from a standard or custom object, it is stored as clear text on the big object.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Define & View Custom Big Object

Define a Custom Big Object: You can define custom big objects with Metadata API or in Setup. After you define and deploy a big object, you can view it or add fields in Setup. After you’ve deployed a big object, you can’t edit or delete the index. To change the index, start over with a new big object. To define a big object in Setup, see Salesforce Help. View a Custom Big Object in Setup After you’ve deployed your custom big object, you can view it by logging in to your organization and, from Setup, entering  Big Objects  in the  Quick Find  box, then selecting  Big Objects . Click the name of a big object, to see its fields and relationships. View a Custom Big Object in Setup After you’ve deployed your custom big object, you can view it by logging in to your organization and, from Setup, entering  Big Objects  in the  Quick Find  box, then selecting  Big Objects . Click the name of a big object, to see its fields and ...

Publish Paltform Events

Publishing Platform Events The Salesforce enterprise messaging platform offers the benefits of event-driven software architectures. Platform events are the event messages (or notifications) that your apps send and receive to take further action. Platform events simplify the process of communicating changes and responding to them without writing complex logic.  Publishers and subscribers communicate with each other through events.  One or more subscribers can listen to the same event and carry out actions. Here we will see how many ways you can able to publish the platform events in Salesforce.  After a platform event has been defined in your Salesforce org, publish event messages from a Salesforce app using processes, flows, or Apex or an external app using Salesforce APIs.Here is the simple platform event object we will be using in the examples here Here are the different ways you can able to publish the platform events in Salesforce Option 1: Using Proces...

Platform Events in Batch Apex

Fire Platform Events from Batch Apex Classes Introduction  With winter 19 release you can able to fire the platform events from the batch apex.Batch Apex classes can opt in to fire platform events when encountering an error or exception. Clients listening on an event can obtain actionable information, such as how often the event failed and which records were in scope at the time of failure. Events are also fired for Salesforce Platform internal errors and other uncatchable Apex exceptions such as LimitExceptions, which are caused by reaching governor limits. An event record provides more granular error tracking than the Apex Jobs UI. It includes the record IDs being processed, exception type, exception message, and stack trace. You can also incorporate custom handling and retry logic for failures. You can invoke custom Apex logic from any trigger on this type of event, so Apex developers can build functionality like custom logging or automated retry handling. To fire a ...