37signals Dev — Rails Multi-Tenancy

In this episode of RECORDABLES, we dig into our ambitious goal of moving from a commingled database to separate SQLite databases for every Fizzy customer. Lead Programmer Mike Dalessio walks through what multi-tenancy actually means in practice, why Rails doesn’t make it easy, and how the open sourced Active Record Tenanted gem makes it more seamless. During the conversation, Mike does a live demo showing what it takes to convert an existing Rails app to multi-tenanted and the safeguards built in to prevent accidental data leaks. You’ll also hear about the edge cases of globally replicated SQLite, and why we ended up launching Fizzy without it.