How to automatically generate a database in SQL Server from an app?

Question

I'm currently developing an app where the users are first asked to create an account trough a website (ASP.NET) to use the app. For a special reason I need to automatically generate a database for each customer creating an account, on the hosted SQL Server. The databases for all the customers are the same.

I was thinking about doing like that: as I have the script for creating the database, I was thinking to insert it in stored procedure or a trigger that will be launched as soon as the user has fully created his account.

I don't really see other solutions, maybe somebody could give me some guidelines? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I think such a design has been shown to not scale. I'd recommend redesigning the schema to allow multiple customers in a single database.

Amazon does not such thing. Neither should you.

Answer 2

I agree duffymo on you would have scalability issues.

However there are situations where in you might prefer separate database as your multi-tenant data approach.

In my last project I had to adopt separate DB approach as business wanted complete isolation for each customer. It was a school administrative system and number of customer was not expected to grow in more than three digits in 5-10 years time.

So the solution I designed was, I used Entity Framework code first approach. Every school will have a unique school identifier which will be used to name the database uniquely for each school. The connection string was generated at runtime obviously. A connection factory was used to create the appropriate DataContext based on passed school identifier. The database is created on first usage if not exist. At the same time SQL script was executed to create db users during db creation if not exist.

If this approach sounds appealing I can share code snippet if that helps.