An Efficient Approach for Supporting Multi-Tenancy Schema Inheritance in RDBMS for SaaS

Abstract

Multi-tenancy refers to a principle in software architecture where a single instance of the software runs on a server, serving multiple client organizations (tenants). Common practice is to map multiple singletenant logical schemas in the application to one multi-tenant physical schema in the database. Such mappings are challenging to create. This is due to the flexibility of base scheme to be extended by enterprise application tenants which provides different dynamically modified versions of the application. The fundamental limitation on scalability of this approach is the number of tables of database can handle. Shared Tables Shared Instances (STSI) is a state-of-the-art approach to design the schema. However, they suffer from poor performance and high space overhead. In this paper, we propose an efficient approach for supporting multi-tenancy schema inheritance. We trade-off STSI and our approach. Experimental results show that our method achieves good scalability and high performance with low space requirement, and outperforms STSI methods at different rates depending on DML operations.