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Asked: 2026-05-13T19:16:10+00:00

I am working with a half dozen DBs. The DBs all have the same

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I am working with a half dozen DBs. The DBs all have the same schemas, the same SPs, etc. Speaking to the person who originally designed the DBs, a big part of the motivation for using many DBs was efficiency; the alternative would be to add a column to pretty much every table and sp in the database indicating which set of data was being worked in, resulting in one giant (and thus slower) DB instead of several samll DBs. In place of having a column to indicate which set of data is being queried, the connection string is used to select which database is being hit.

The only reason I really dislike this organization is that it involves a lot of code duplication and thus hurts maintenance. For example, every time I wish to change a stored procedure, I need to run the alter statement on every database.

One solution I have considered is to combine all of the data into one big database, adding an extra column all over the place to indicate which database the data would be in if I had not combined it. Then, I could partition all of the tables by this column’s value. In theory, the result of all of this is that the underlying representation of all of the data itself will be morally the same as it is now, but without the redundancies in the indexes, schemas, SPs, etc.

My questions are this:

  1. Is this a good idea? Is there a better way to accomplish this?
  2. Are there any gotchas in doing this?
  3. Will this have any impact on performance?
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  1. Editorial Team

    Everyone will deal with this at some point. My own personal opinion is that multiple databases are a pain in the backside and are not faster. They are a pain because of the maintenance headaches. Adding an extra column in each table as necessary will not slow your process done that much, if indexing is set properly. And your maintenance will be much easier. Plus, doing transactions across multiple DB’s can be a hassle and involve MTC.

    BTW, using a single database is often called a multi-tenant database. You might want to research this a bit. But I would avoid multiple DB’s like this if possible.

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