Rails - Multi tenant application with customization framework

Question

I am organizing a multi tenant application with a single code base/application using subdomains to detect the tenant, then runs a SET SCHEMA on postgres to do the fun stuff.

Answer 1

If you're talking about switching databases on the fly between requests then I think you're in for a world of hurt, at least when it comes to using ActiveRecord. This will mess up the caching system severely as it remembers things based on ID, not ID + Schema, which could result in cross-contamination.

Generally, from an architectural perspective, it's best to partition your database internally and have every record scoped accordingly. For instance:

class Site < ActiveRecord::Base
  # Represents a site or installation of the application
end

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :site
end

Link everything up to the main Site record, or whatever term would best describe the method you use to partition. Maintaining a consistent scope is far easier than switching schema.

If, for reasons of scaling, you want to split the database in the future, if you've been careful to tag all of a site's associated records with a consistent site_id column, you can easily transpose all of these records to a new database.