A review of multi-tenant database and factors that influence its adoption

A Multi-tenant database (MTD) is a way of deploying a Database as a Service (DaaS). This is gaining momentum with significant increase in the number of organizations ready to take advantage of the technology. A multi-tenant database refers to a principle where a single instance of a Database Management System (DBMS) runs on a server, serving multiple clients organizations (tenants). This is a database which provides database support to a number of separate and distinct groups of users or tenants. This concept spreads the cost of hardware, software and other services to a large number of tenants, therefore significantly reducing per tenant cost. Three different approaches of implementing multi-tenant database have been identified. These methods have been shown to be increasingly better at pooling resources and also processing administrative operations in bulk. This paper reports the requirement of multi-tenant databases, challenges of implementing MTD, database migration for elasticity in MTD and factors influencing the choice of models in MTD. An insightful discussion is presented in this paper by grouping these factors into four categories. This shows that the degree of tenancy is an influence to the approach to be adopted and the capital and operational expenditure are greatly reduced in comparison with an on-premises solution.