If you’re building a SaaS application, you probably already have the notion of tenancy built in your data model. Typically, most information relates to tenants / customers / accounts and your database tables capture this natural relation. With smaller amounts of data, it’s easy to throw more hardware at the problem and scale up your database. As these tables grow however, you need to think about ways to scale your multi-tenant database across dozens or hundreds of machines. In this talk, we're first going to talk about motivations behind scaling your SaaS (multi-tenant) database and several heuristics we found helpful on deciding when to scale. We'll then describe three design patterns that are common in scaling SaaS databases: (1) Create one database per tenant, (2) Create one schema per tenant, and (3) Have all tenants share the same table(s). Next, we'll highlight the tradeoffs involved with each design pattern and focus on one pattern that scales to hundreds of thousands of tenants. We'll also share an example architecture from the industry that describes this pattern in more detail. Last, we'll talk about key PostgreSQL properties, such as semi-structured data types, that make building multi-tenant applications easy. We'll also mention Citus as a method to scale out your multi-tenant database. We'll conclude by answering frequently asked questions on multi-tenant databases and Q&A.

Date:

Duration:

50 min

Room:

Conference:

PGConf US 2017 [PgConf.US]

Language:

Track:

Development

Difficulty:

Medium