I have found this very good thread from 2006 about multi-tenant applications: http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk/browse_thread/thread/25bc6cd899318d9a/
I'm making my app available to multiple customers and right now my strategy is: 1. svn export code each customer has their own 2. rake setup:initialize client_name which creates the databases and the database.yml file 3. rake db:migrate which creates all tables 4. rake setup:blank_slate customer_name which adds some necessary predefined data from a couple of YML files.
The problems with this setup are: * the memory usage each tenant uses their own process and that takes a lot of memory which is ridiculous considering that they run the same code * management and provisioning issues Updates are cumbersome and creating another app for a tenant is time consuming and not that automated. The whole process takes about 1 minute. I I ddn't check out the code it would take less than 20 seconds.
I used before a hijack_db metod as a before_filter in ApplicationController that switched the database depending on the domain. I'm not sure about the performance or security of that hack. How do you guys manage multiiple tenants and multiple databases?