I am reasonably new to Ruby on Rails so I am not sure how to implement this. My understanding is that rails is not designed with multiple databases in mind, although I could use establish_connection etc to make it work.
My main problem is:
I have an SaaS/application that will serve several businesses. Each
business will have several database tables such as: users, comments,
messages, transfers, navigation history, logs etc. It seems I have 3
options:
1: Store everybody’s data in one database with every object belonging_to a business or just tagging something like a businessID/name. Use this tag to fetch the appropriate data and worry about scaling/performance later as my app grows. (Would I have to worry about this pretty early on?)
2: One database per Business. No need to store associations, and db queries perform consistently throughout the application’s life (possibly bad assumption here).
3: Have separate instances of my app each running some number of businesses (not sure this is any good).
What I have seen used in other frameworks/businesses is just (2) multiple dbs.
I am also really interested is what is the best practice in rails as well. I know several applications have this same problem and hearing how this has been solved will help.
Any help is much appreciated. Thank you so much.
Env.
Ruby 1.9.2
Rails 3.1
Production:Heroku or EY (still deciding, now running on heroku)
According to this page, You’d need to apply some metaprogramming for multiple databases.
Why not make your deployment script to deploy to different directories with different database settings? One branch per business? Might require some more maintenance, but allows for per-business code if you need it.