How the Hell Is Salesforce Computing Data Consumption?

Q: “How the Hell is Salesforce computing data consumption?”

A: Let’s start with the basics:

• click on Setup | Data | Storage Usage to see consumption
• read The Official Salesforce Explanation of consumption in the helplink on the Storage Usage page

. . . but the short takeaway is “each record is assumed to take up 2 KB”.

This is kinda cool–a record can obviously take up a heckuva lot more than 2 KB. In my company’s org, the long text fields alone could consume more than 1.5 MB of storage for a single record.

There are a couple of weird wrinkles, like junction objects. . .

• Campaign Members, Opportunity Splits, and Case Team Members DO count against storage.
• Account and Opportunity Team Members DON’T.

Campaigns. . .

• each Campaign counts for 8 KB of storage.

Historical Trending. . .

• each Historical Trending record counts for 1 KB of storage.

and Email Messages’ actual size is computed in determining consumption.

If, like me, you wanted to try replicating Storage Usage’s “Storage” column in, say, a spreadsheet: wonder no more!

If you copy the four columns of the Storage Usage table into a Google Sheet, here’s the Google Sheets formula that will replicate Salesforce’s “Storage” column:

=IFS(A2="Email Messages",
        TEXT(B2,"#,##0"" recs"""),
     A2="Campaigns",
        IFS(B2*8<1024,TEXT(B2*8,"#,##0 ""KB"""),
            B2*8<1048576,TEXT(B2/1024*8,"#,##0.0 ""MB"""),
            B2*8<1073741824,TEXT(B2/1048576*8,"#,##0.0 ""GB""")),
     OR(A2="Campaign Members",NOT(ISERR(FIND("(Historical)",A2)))),
           IFS(B2<1024,TEXT(B2,"#,##0 ""KB"""),
               B2<1048576,TEXT(B2/1024,"#,##0.0 ""MB"""),
               B2<1073741824,TEXT(B2/1048576,"#,##0.0 ""GB""")),
     B2>0,IFS(B2*2<1024,TEXT(B2*2,"#,##0 ""KB"""),
               B2*2<1048576,TEXT(B2/1024*2,"#,##0.0 ""MB"""),
               B2*2<1073741824,TEXT(B2/1048576*2,"#,##0.0 ""GB""")),
     B2=0,"0 B")

Two notes:

• this formula assumes “Record Type” was pasted into column A and “Record Count” was pasted into column B.
• I can’t give you the consumption of Email Messages, alas–it depends on the actual size of the records, which couldn’t be broken down further without, say, downloading EmailMessage via a tool like Data Loader.

If you just wanted to know how many bytes Salesforce claims you’re taking up:

=IFS(A2="Email Messages", TEXT(B2,"#,##0"" recs"""),
     A2="Campaigns", B2*1024*8,
     OR(A2="Campaign Members",NOT(ISERR(FIND("(Historical)",A2)))), B2*1024,
     A2<>"", B2*1024*2)

The same two notes from above apply to this formula as well.

Nice to know that Salesforce is computing its Kilobytes, Megabytes, and Gigabytes honestly, using 1024, 1024², and 1024³, and not just slapping zeroes after 1024!