Evaluating the performance of multi-tenant Elastic Extension Tables

An important challenge in the design of databases that support multi-tenant applications is to provide a platform to manage large volumes of data collected from different businesses, social media networks, emails, news, online texts, documents, and other data sources. To overcome this challenge we proposed in our previous work a multi-tenant database schema called Elastic Extension Tables (EET) that combines multi-tenant relational tables and virtual relational tables in a single database schema. Using this approach, the tenants' tables can be extended to support the requirements of individual tenants. In this paper, we discuss the potentials of using EET multi-tenant database schema, and show how it can be used for managing physical and virtual relational data. We perform several experiments to measure the feasibility and effectiveness of EET by comparing it with a commercially availab le multi-tenant schema mapping technique used by SalesForce.com. We report significant performance improvements obtained using EET when compared to Universal Table Schema Mapping (UTSM), making the EET schema a good candidate for the management of multitenant data in Software as a Service (SaaS) and Big Data applications. © The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V