Question

I have a web application that in many ways can be considered to be a multi-tenant environment. By this I mean that each user of the application gets their own ‘custom’ environment, with absolutely no interaction between those users.

So far I have built the web application as a ‘single user’ environment. In other words, I haven’t actually done anything to support multi-users, but only worked on the functionality I want from the app. Here is my problem… What’s the best way to build a multi-user environment:

1. All users point to the same ‘core’ backend. In other words, I build the logic to separate users via appropriate SQL queries (eg. select * from table where user=’123′ and attribute=’456′).
2. Each user points to a unique tablespace, which is built separately as they join the system. In this case I would simply generate ALL the relevant SQL tables per user, with some sort of suffix for the user. (eg. now a query would look like ‘select * from table_ where attribute =’456’).

In short, it’s a difference between “select * from table where USER=” and “select * from table_USER”.

Answer 1

Creating tables dynamically is rather dirty and confusing. Additionally, if you have lots of users it’ll be a complete chaos if you have tons of tables – especially if you need to change something in n tables instead of a single table.

–> Use one table and add some user_id column. With proper indexes this will be as fast or even faster than separate tables.