Data archiving strategies

Just as we have data on Salesforce for our users, there are situations where data needs to be archived off the platform. This may be due to various reasons, such as regulatory compliance (where certain data needs to be retained), or to keep the optimum amount of data in the platform (such as only the data that is being used being kept on the platform, and automatically archiving data over a certain age). Luckily, various options are available for archiving Salesforce data, such as using on-platform solutions such as big objects or storing data off-platform in an external system or data warehouse. We’ll take a look at these options in the following subsections.

Big objects

As covered in Chapter 2, Data Modeling and Database Design, big objects are used to store and manage huge amounts of data (up to 1 million records by default, though this can be scaled up at an additional cost to tens of millions or even billions of records).

Big objects provide...