Ruminations on Multi-Tenant Databases
Dean Jacobs, Stefan Aulbach · 2007
Abstract: This is a position paper on multi-tenant databases. As motivation, it first describes the emerging marketplace of hosted enterprise services and the importance of using multi-tenancy to handle high traffic volumes at low cost. It then outlines the main requirements on multi-tenant databases: scale up by consolidating multiple tenants onto the same server and scale out by providing an administrative framework that manages a farm of such servers. Finally it describes three approaches to implementing multi-tenant databases and compares them based on some simple experiments. The main conclusion is that existing database vendors need to enhance their products to better support multi-tenancy. 1 Hosted Services and Multi-Tenancy In the hosted service model [GM02a, GM02b, Wa03], a service provider develops an application and operates the system that hosts it. Customers access the application over the Internet using industry-standard web browsers or Web Services clients. As the Internet has matured, hosted services have appeared for an increasingly wide variety of enterprise applications, including ones that manage sales, marketing, support, human resources, planning, manufacturing, inventory, financials, purchasing, and compliance [Th06]. While hosted services are attractive to all segments of the market, they are particularly appealing to small- to mediumsized businesses, which often lack the resources to maintain a complex data center. Hosted services are