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Changing the role hierarchy and reassigning account owners can have a significant impact on the data visibility and performance of Salesforce. An architect should consider the following points in this situation:

Changing complex role hierarchy can cause a high level of sharing recalculation. Depending on the sharing settings, roles can control the level of visibility that users have into the Salesforce data. Users at any given role level can view, edit, and report on all data owned by or shared with users below them in the role hierarchy, unless the sharing model for an object specifies otherwise. When the role hierarchy is changed, Salesforce must recalculate the sharing rules and group membership for all the affected users and records, which can take a long time and consume a lot of system resources. Therefore, changing a complex role hierarchy should be done carefully and preferably during off-peak hours1.

Replacing account records ownerships massively can cause data skew. Data skew occurs when more than 10,000 child records are related to the same parent record, or more than 10,000 records of any object are owned by a single user. This can cause performance issues, such as locking, timeouts, and failures, when updating or sharing those records. When account owners are reassigned massively, it can create or worsen data skew, especially if the accounts have many child records, such as contacts and opportunities. Therefore, replacing account records ownerships massively should be avoided or minimized23.