Multi-tenant PHP SaaS - Separate DB's for each client, or group them?

Question

You\'ll have to bear with me here for possibly getting some of the terminology slightly wrong as I wasn\'t even aware that this fell into the whole \'multi-tenant\' \'softwa

Answer 1

I agree with Ozzy - I did this for an online database product. We had one master database that basically had a glorified user table. Each customer had their own database. What was great about this is that I could move one customers database from server A to server B easily [mysql] and could do so with command line tools in a pinch. Also doing maintenance on large tables, dropping/adding indexes can really screw up your application, especially if say, adding an index locks the table [mysql]. It affects everyone. With, presumably, smaller databases you are more immune to this and have more options when you need to roll out schema level changes. I just like the flexibility.