Maintaining multi-tenant shared-schema database

Question

I want to convert my application (Asp.net mvc 3, SQL Server) to serve multi-tenants in a shared database and shared schema.

My question is How to maintain (backup/ restore) the data for each tenant ?

Answer 1

Shared database and shared schema provides you with the lowest possible level of isolation for your tenants. There's no such notion as backing up only some parts of the data and then restoring them assuming that they all go into the same table. You should make a full backup/restore.

In order to achieve what you are looking for with the shared database, shared schema approach you will have to write custom scripts that are extracting the data for a particular tenant and storing it in some file. Contrary to the other multi-tenant approaches in this design the database cannot offer you easy way to make per-tenant backups/restores.