A Study and Performance Evaluation of the Multi-Tenant Data Tier Design Patterns for Service Oriented Computing

Multi-tenancy is one of key characteristics of the service oriented computing especially for Software as a Service (SaaS) to leverage economy of scale to drive down total cost of ownership for both service consumer and provider. This paper aims to study the technologies to build a cost-effective, secure and scalable multi-tenant infrastructure, especially in data tier. We first explore all the key implementation patterns of data tier multi-tenancy on aspects of isolation, security, customization & scalability etc. Furthermore, we mainly evaluate the performance of these design patterns on aspects of isolation and security via a series of experiments and simulations. This paper also identifies the potential performance bottlenecks, summarizes corresponding optimization approaches and best implementation practices for different multi-tenant business usage models.