Salesforce's Big Objects offer a different kind of storage solution. These objects are designed to store billions of records, such as those receiving device input, either in an Internet of Things (IoT) scenario or data archive. Every Salesforce org has 1 million records' worth of Big Object storage for free; after that, you can contact your Salesforce account manager to purchase further increments. For size calculation purposes, each record is considered 2 KB in size regardless of the field data size.

Record data is typically written on mass using bulk loading and later read frequently, or, put another way, it is "written less and read often." In contrast, Custom Objects are designed for millions of records, not billions. As such, older race data stored in the Race Data Custom Object, introduced later in this chapter, could be considered a good candidate to place in a Race Data History object. We will explore this use case for Big Objects further in Chapter 11, Asynchronous Processing and Big Data Volumes.