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A Methodology for Tenant Migration in Legacy Shared-Table Multi-tenant Applications

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Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems (DAIS 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCCN,volume 12718))

Abstract

Multi-tenancy enables cost-effective SaaS through resource consolidation. Multiple customers, or tenants, are served by a single application instance, and isolation is enforced at the application level. Service load for different tenants can vary over time, requiring applications to scale in and out. A large class of SaaS providers operates legacy applications structured around a relational (SQL) database. These applications achieve tenant isolation through dedicated fields in their relational schema and are not designed to support scaling operations. We present a novel solution for scaling in or out such applications through the migration of a tenant’s data to new application and database instances. Our solution requires no change to the application and incurs no service downtime for non-migrated tenants. It leverages external tables and foreign data wrappers, as supported by major relational databases. We evaluate the approach using two multi-tenant applications: Iomad, an extension of the Moodle Learning Management System, and Camunda, a business process management platform. Our results show the usability of the method, minimally impacting performance for other tenants during migration and leading to increased service capacity after migration.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Database sharding, e.g., using PL/Proxy [22] allows splitting the content of tables over multiple database nodes, but it is not elastic: changing the sharding plan requires to restart the database. Database specific extensions such as the Citus extension for Postgresql or Vitess for Mysql permit automatic scaling. However, they imply switching to specific engines, with their limitations and limited support.

  2. 2.

    Foreign Data Wrappers availability is vendor-dependent. Postgres, MySQL, and MariaDB support the ISO standard. Db2, SQL Server and Oracle do not support it, but offer similar features (with respectively distributed databases, linked servers, and database link). Support of distributed transactions is also vendor-dependent: they are not supported in MySQL, are only partially supported in PostgreSQL and the Open Source engine FederatedX of MariaDB, and fully supported in commercial engines such as Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, and the Spider engine of MariaDB.

  3. 3.

    This inconvenience can be addressed by using database triggers emulating the integrity constraints.

  4. 4.

    https://github.com/CloudLargeScale-UCLouvain/legacy-sql-migration.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially funded by the Belgian FNRS project DAPOCA (33694591).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ICTeam, UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Guillaume Rosinosky & Etienne Rivière

  2. LORIA - Inria, Nancy, France

    Samir Youcef & François Charoy

Authors
  1. Guillaume Rosinosky
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  2. Samir Youcef
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  3. François Charoy
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  4. Etienne Rivière
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Guillaume Rosinosky .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Miguel Matos

  2. Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil

    Fabíola Greve

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Rosinosky, G., Youcef, S., Charoy, F., Rivière, E. (2021). A Methodology for Tenant Migration in Legacy Shared-Table Multi-tenant Applications. In: Matos, M., Greve, F. (eds) Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems. DAIS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12718. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78198-9_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78198-9_1

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