Chapter 3. Application Storage

It is important to consider your customers' storage needs and use cases around their data creation and consumption patterns early in the application design phase. This ensures that your object schema is the most optimum one with respect to large data volumes, data migration processes (inbound and outbound), and storage cost. In this chapter, we will extend the Custom Objects in the FormulaForce application as we explore how the platform stores and manages data. We will also explore the difference between your applications operational data and configuration data and the benefits of using Custom Metadata Types for configuration management and deployment.

You will obtain a good understanding of the types of storage provided, and how the costs associated with each are calculated. It is also important to understand the options that are available when it comes to reusing or attempting to mirror the Standard Objects such as Account, Opportunity, or Product, which extend the discussion further into license cost considerations. You will also become aware of the options for standard and custom indexes over your application data, which will lead to the topic of handling large data volumes, covered in an entire chapter later in this book. Finally, we will gain some insight into new platform features for consuming external data storage from within the platform.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Mapping out end user storage requirements
• Understanding the different storage types
• Record identification, uniqueness, and auto numbering
• Record relationships
• Reusing existing Standard Objects
• Applying external IDs and unique fields
• Importing and exporting application data
• Options for replicating and archiving data
• External data sources