An in-memory database system for multi-tenant applications

Abstract

Software as a service (SaaS) has become a viable alternative for small and mid-size companies to outsource IT for a reduction of their total cost of IT ownership. SaaS providers need to be competitive w. r. t. total cost of ownership. Therefore, they typically consolidate multiple customer systems to share resources at all possible levels: hardware, software, data, and personnel. This kind of resource sharing is known as multitenancy. In this paper, we will focus on the aspect of multitenancy regarding our new in-memory database system – the SAP in-memory computing engine. In particular, we will motivate the requirements of multitenant applications towards the database engine and we will highlight major design decisions made to support multitenancy natively in the in-memory computing engine.