Shared Table Access Pattern Analysis for Multi-Tenant Applications

With the rise of applications in the area of software as a service it becomes crucial to operate profitable even with small profit margins. The possibility of customers to switch between different hosted solutions makes the calculation of the total cost of ownership even more important. Not only the application design is an important factor in this calculation but as well the employed storage techniques used to create and maintain thousands of instances of the same application play one of the most important roles in this game. None of the well-known commercial of the shelf databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc. provides an optimized solution for multi-tenancy problems. In this paper we analyze typical operations in the area of multi-tenant databases and show how they are wired together. Based on the analysis we propose an architecture for a multi-tenant storage engine capable to overcome the problems of typical relational databases in this area.