Revisiting Account Skew
As introduced in Chapter 2, Data Modeling and Database Design, Account Skew is the result of an Account record containing 10,000 or more child records. This causes performance and record locking issues.
When updates are made to the child record of an Account, Salesforce locks the parent Account record to maintain record integrity in the database. Updating a large number of child records under the same Account record may cause issues since each of those child record operations will be trying to lock the parent’s Account record.
Additionally, when updates are made to an Account record that affects sharing, such as a seemingly harmless action such as changing the record owner, then all sharing for that Account will have to be recalculated. This goes for all child records of the account. This can cause many inter-connected processes to fail since sharing rules, Role Hierarchy calculations, and other sharing operations will have to take place. If any...