020 is definitely the craziest year I have seen in my entire life. What is happening around the world, no one could see that coming. It’s a mad time.
Here are some crazy things that happened:
- Almost WWIII
- Australian wildfires
- COVID-19
- Trump impeachment
- Kobe Bryant death
- George Floyd riots
Meantime, in the Ruby On Rails we are stuck in the old ways. An earlier solution for multitenancy in Rails is still widely used even though it is not optimal in contemporary times.
I am talking about you, https://github.com/influitive/apartment. You were quite a good fellow over the years and truly useful, but it’s time to move on. Let’s start this new decade with something that doesn’t cause so many problems.
What is multitenancy?
Multitenancy usually means handling many independent tenants from one app. Most popular in SAAS models. There are several types of implementation. Let’s look at them closer.
Row-level approach
You have a tenant_id column in every DB table and filter by tenant_id in each query.
Advantages:
- Just another row in the table
- No brainer
- Migrations run in O(1) complexity
- Comes out of the box in Rails
- No additional costs
- No operational overhead
- No cost of switching
Disadvantages:
- tenant_id keys everywhere
- Leaking of data between tenants possible, if you forget about WHERE
Schema-level approach (Apartment gem)
Every tenant has a separate namespace. In practice, we are creating more tables like:
Namespacing is easily achievable with PostgreSQL schemas.
Advantages:
- No data leakages between tenants
- Easy extraction of single-tenant data
- No additional costs
Disadvantages:
- Less known PG feature & stateful search_path
- A growing number of database tables. Heroku is against this approach when you are using their services https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgresql#multiple-schemas
- Migrations run in O(n) complexity
- Trouble on managed databases
- Slower (create a schema, create tables)
- **(Apartment) **No support for Rails 6.0
- **(Apartment) **Gem no longer supported
- **(Apartment) **Code is not written optimally, found couple performance errors
- **(Apartment) **Creators are not even encouraging it https://influitive.io/our-multi-tenancy-journey-with-postgres-schemas-and-apartment-6ecda151a21f
- **(Apartment) **Sometimes migrations are not run in some namespaces which leads to an inconsistent data structure
#technology #software-development #ruby-on-rails #architecture #ruby
