Behind the Scenes of Record Ownership in Salesforce | Developer Force Blog
Record ownership is at the core of Salesforce’s record access capabilities, which allow you to specify which users or types of users should be able to access specific records or types of records. Salesforce.com’s architects and developers have spent years creating a highly functional and massively scalable record access infrastructure around record ownership, saving you the monumental effort of building that infrastructure yourself. In this post, you'll learn how those years of heavy lifting have actually simplified record access for the most common enterprise security models, allowing you to configure record access declaratively instead of with painstakingly developed code. You'll also get an “under the hood” view of record access, and learn how to implement your record access model and avoid potential pitfalls along the way.