Developers at Universal Containers need to build a report for the business which displays Accounts opened in the past year grouped by industry. This report will also include information from contacts, opportunities, and orders. There are several million Accounts in the system. Which two options should be recommended to make this report perform well and satisfy the business need?

DreamHouse Realty uses Custom Metadata Types instead of Custom setting.
What is an advantage of this decision?

Universal Containers (UC) owns a complex Salesforce org with many Apex classes, triggers, and automated processes that will modify records if available. UC has identified that, in its current development state, UC runs change of encountering race condition on the same record.
What should a data architect recommend to guarantee that records are not being updated at the same time?

Universal Containers has a large volume of Contact data going into Salesforce.com. There are 100,000 existing contact records. 200,000 new contacts will be loaded. The Contact object has an external ID field that is unique and must be populated for all existing records.
What should the architect recommend to reduce data load processing time?

Universal Containers (UC) is implementing a new customer categorization process where customers should be assigned to a Gold, Silver, or Bronze category if they've purchased UC's new support service. Customers are expected to be evenly distributed across all three categories. Currently, UC has around 500,000 customers, and is expecting 1% of existing non-categorized customers to purchase UC's new support service every month over the next five years. What is the recommended solution to ensure long-term performance, bearing in mind the above requirements?