A multi-tenant database architecture design for software applications

Multi-tenant database is a new cloud computing paradigm that has recently attracted attention to deliver database functionalities for multiple tenants to create, store, and access their databases over the internet. This multi-tenant database should be highly configurable and secure to meet tenants' expectations and their different business requirements. In this paper, we propose an architecture design to build an intermediate database layer to be used between software applications and Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) to store and access multiple tenants' data in the Elastic Extension Table (EET) multi-tenant database schema. This database layer combines multi-tenant relational tables and virtual relational tables and makes them work together to act as one database for each tenant. This architecture design is suitable for multi-tenant database environment that can run any business domain database by using a combination of a database schema, which contains shared physical structured tables and virtual structured tenant's tables. Further, this multi-tenant database architecture design can be used as a base to build software applications in general and Software as a Service (SaaS) applications in particular. © 2013 IEEE