Hypothetical:



You are designing a product from the ground up. In the end you will have data for 20 different companies in said product. Do you have one database and add a customer ID to each table, or do you have 20 different databases?



I can see arguements for each scenario....



Opinions?




Keith Chisarik

Yep, it seems in your situation, multiple would be the better approach. If I were you however, I'd spend some time automating some of the admin, such that 500 dbs will be only a slightly more work to update than 20



I'd suggest that you have a rule that any customization only ADDS to the database, so any updates to the standard schema are always valid in all cases. You could of course ignore existing columns/tables for a customer, but you don't want to get into the situation where you can't update a customer because the standard schema has been customized...that would get ugly very fast.

It just occurred to me that as part of the automation you could write a command line DDT package installer. That way you could use batch/command files to update all dbs at once. You could have the db name as one of the parametersw (package file would likely be a parameter as well). Then you could easily update gagillions of dbs with one script