Multi-Tenant Database Design
Learn the three approaches to multi-tenant databases — shared tables with RLS, schema-per-tenant, and database-per-tenant — with practical implementation guidance.
You're building a SaaS application. Multiple companies sign up. Each company has their own users, data, and settings. Company A must never see Company B's data. But you don't want to run a separate database for each customer — that would be an operational nightmare with hundreds of customers.
This is the multi-tenancy problem, and how you solve it affects your security, performance, cost, and ability to scale.
What Is Multi-Tenancy?
A "tenant" is a customer organization that uses your application. In a multi-tenant system, multiple tenants share the same application infrastructure. The challenge is keeping their data isolated while maintaining the operational simplicity of a shared system.
There are three main approaches, each with different tradeoffs:
- Shared tables (row-le
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