The Entity-Attribute-Value Data Model in a Multi-tenant Shared Data Environment

Service providers in the Software as a Service (SaaS) Business offer the same or similar services to multiple tenants. Presentation, business logic and persistence layer are shared by all tenants. However, in many cases tenants have a great need to customize their application. In this paper we investigate the use of Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) databases for multi tenant applications. In the EAV design attributes are not recorded as columns in a table but in rows. Since databases are designed for changing the number of rows rather than columns in tables this improves the performance of the customization process.