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 Single Database Design

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Girlnet
Yak Posting Veteran

77 Posts

Posted - 2008-09-12 : 10:59:34
I'm wondering what everyone's opinion is . . .

Would you be comfortable buying a solution that uses a single database method for every customer they have?

There is an ERP solution that sells their product as a ASP model - they manage your data. But . . . every customer shares the same database. That ALOT of data!

Girlnet
Yak Posting Veteran

77 Posts

Posted - 2008-09-12 : 14:00:41
The people involved are telling me it's no big deal to do this - but I don't have any warm fuzzies.

Is it perfectly OK to have 300 companies all utilizing the same database?

Please anyone?
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tkizer
Almighty SQL Goddess

38200 Posts

Posted - 2008-09-12 : 14:08:41
Yes that's okay! I would hate to support 300 databases when all I needed was 1.

I was actually recently complaining about a 3rd party solution that was going to create a database for each of our customers. We've got thousands of customers. I told them, "absolutely not".

If you need to scale out the single database, then you'd do that via partitioning.

Tara Kizer
Microsoft MVP for Windows Server System - SQL Server
http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/tarad/

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Girlnet
Yak Posting Veteran

77 Posts

Posted - 2008-09-12 : 14:24:15
What about performance then? Wouldn't performance start to degrade on a database with 3 trillion rows to query versus 3 hundred? Or is this when data mining starts to kick in?
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tkizer
Almighty SQL Goddess

38200 Posts

Posted - 2008-09-12 : 14:26:33
See the last sentence in my last post.

Tara Kizer
Microsoft MVP for Windows Server System - SQL Server
http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/tarad/

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Girlnet
Yak Posting Veteran

77 Posts

Posted - 2008-09-12 : 14:37:27
Isn't partioning a new feature of SQL 2005?
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tkizer
Almighty SQL Goddess

38200 Posts

Posted - 2008-09-12 : 14:41:55
No. In SQL Server 2000, there are partitioned views. SQL Server 2005 brings us partitioned tables and still supports partitioned views.

The benefit to partitioned views is that you can federate them, meaning you can spread the partitions amongst SQL Server instances which means you can spread across more hardware.

I like partitioned views better for scaleability reasons.

Tara Kizer
Microsoft MVP for Windows Server System - SQL Server
http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/tarad/

Subscribe to my blog
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Girlnet
Yak Posting Veteran

77 Posts

Posted - 2008-09-12 : 14:51:57
Thanks Tara - good information.
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