bala_karat wrote:

> Hi !
>
> I am new to on-demand applications. This is to seek opinion on designing databse(s) for such applications.
>
> There will be multiple accounts and there will be multiple users under each account. Is the complete data normally kept under one DB or under multiple DBs? Is this decision on the size of data or any other criterion?
>
> As an example, take any of the on-demand/hosted ERP application. Will they be keeping separate DB for each account?

That depends on the structure you are trying to support.
A similar question has just come up on the bitweaver list and in that case the
user wanted to maintain different 'accounts/sites' on different machines, but
with a common login database so that some users could use multiple 'sites'. In
this case, multiple databases are the ideal, since they are also on multiple
machines, and using LDAP over the top allows access to be managed on a user by
user basis, but allowing access to any of the sites.

If everything is on one machine, or set of machines providing a single
application/database service, then it may be easier to provide a single
database with something like the 'multi-site' function of bitweaver, which
sections off content to separate 'accounts' or 'groups'. There is only one
database to manage and generic information such as the help system only exists
once.

It depends on the level of isolation that is either needed between the accounts.

--
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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