An Improved Schema-Sharing Technique for a Software as a Service Application to Enhance Drinking Water Safety
Franclin S. Foping, Ioannis M. Dokas, John Feehan, Syed Imran
Journal of Information Security Research, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2010.
DOI: 
Link: http://www.dline.info/jisr/fulltext/v1n1/1.pdf
Abstract:
Despite their dominance and wide acceptance, relational databases are unable to meet all waits and needs of multi-tenant applications. By way of example, relational databases do not provide any â€œtenantâ€ concept, therefore a typical relational database has to be tweaked to support multi-tenancy. This paper addresses this shortage by presenting a new schema-sharing technique for multi-tenant applications. Our approach is built on top of the Extension table method and makes use of the native XML data support to store the additional data supplied by each tenant. It also demonstrates how we integrated our proposed technique in to a real-world prototype Software as a Service application that was designed to enhance publics access to up-to-date records of drinking water monitoring results. It also discusses the benefits and drawbacks of our new hybrid schema-sharing technique.