Use case: we have 500,000 Contacts with the wrong Owner. I need to go through each record, compare owner to another table of territory assignments, then update the Owner based on assignments. I found three solutions.

1. Zoho CRM custom function - major limitation. Can only update 10,000 records per day. Time to complete: 50 days.

2. ETL - download all the Contacts, use a local script/process to generate a new CSV file with updated date, import to Zoho CRM. Slight limitation. Can only do 30,000 records per CSV file, but no limit on number of files. Time to complete: 1 to 2 days

3. Mass Update - minimal limitation can only select 50,000 records at once. Use views in Contacts module to select many records, click Mass Update and change Owner. There are 70 territories, so I have to create 70 views. Time to complete: 1/2 to 1 day.

This seems backwards to me. The labor-intensive method is the fastest with no significant limitation. I can do this basically as fast as I can click. On the other hand, the programmatic method is the slowest. It is so slow that it essentially useless.

Similar use case: we have 100,000s of Contacts with missing address data. The data exists on the Account and just needs to be copied to the Contact. I have a Workflow that does this automatically on creation of new Contact. Limitation - Workflow only runs when number of records created is 1000 or less.

The same issue applies to this case. Programmatic solution is the slowest.