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Database Administration
Maintaining and Monitoring Your Database : Multi-tenant database : Multi-tenant database introduction
 

Multi-tenant database introduction

A multi-tenant database is a database that provides support to a number of separate and distinct groups of users, referred to as tenants. Multi-tenant applications have taken an increasingly larger foothold in the database marketplace largely due to the emergence of SaaS as a deployment strategy. For the SaaS application provider a multi-tenant deployment strategy provides many benefits, especially when a shared tenancy approach is used. Management of the deployment can take place either at the overall application or database level, or based on tenant and user. Operational complexity is reduced when resources are shared and only one instance of the application and database needs to be maintained.
The process of developing and deploying multi-tenant applications is transformed and simplified by using the OpenEdge approach that reduces, and even eliminates, the challenges typically presented when implementing a shared tenancy application. This is due to two major factors:
*Tenant support is implemented in the database layer, completely removing the requirement that tenancy be managed by the application.
*Database utilities and tools are also tenant-aware.
For most applications, migrating an existing OpenEdge application to a multi-tenant application will only require minor changes to support the use of a multi-tenant database. The changes will be specific to the tenant authentication.
By implementing tenant support in the database layer, once the tenant identity is asserted the code that tenants run when using a multi-tenant database is exactly the same as with the same application running in a non-tenancy configuration. The tenancy (or non-tenancy) aspect is completely transparent. By updating the database utilities and tools to be database aware, the utilities can perform maintenance on tenant-specific data. For example, index maintenance, data dump and load, and object moves, can take place at the tenant level as well as across the entire database.
Database multi-tenancy is available to customers with an Enterprise RDBMS and an add-on product called OpenEdge Multi-tenant Tables, for deployment. For development, customers with a Development Server license can create and configure multi-tenant databases and develop multi-tenant applications.