We are about to begin development of a large scale web based application (in
PHP5 with FB 1.5 as backend database, on Linux), and one of the key customer
requirements is that a customer can elect to have us host their application
& database, or that they can request to move their database to their own
server and host it themselves if they wish.

In designing to meet this requirement, it would seem that the easiest way to
allow us to not only scale our production environment, but to provide this
capability for the customer is to have a central FB database that contains
all the customer account data that the customer's validate through, but to
have separate databases for each customer that contains just their data.
This way if we have to move the database to another location, we can simply
do a backup of their specific database, and give it to them along with the
application.

After thinking this through, I'm considering that we could have thousands of
separate Firebird databases running on multiple separate servers, to handle
this request. Any individual server will probably have 100+ databases on
it. I understand that each server runs a single security database for user
accounts, etc. but other than this consolidation, are there any issues I
should be concerned about with this architecture that others have
encountered?

Thanks in advance for any insight.

Myles


============================
Myles Wakeham
Director of Engineering
Tech Solutions US, Inc.
Scottsdale, Arizona USA
Phone (480) 451-7440
www.techsol.org