Entity Framework core - multi tenant application

Question

I'm looking to develop a multi-tenant application based on EF core and Azure SQL. I don't want to create separate databases for each tenant. Instead I'd like to provision prefixed tables. For example:

public class Product : BaseEntity
{
    [DisplayName("Name")]
    [MaxLength(100)]
    [Required]
    public string Description { get; set; }

    [DisplayName("SKU")]
    [MaxLength(30)]
    [Required]
    public string SKU { get; set; }

    [DisplayName("Price")]
    [Column(TypeName = "decimal(18,4)")]
    public decimal Price { get; set; }
}

Resulting in a table per tenant:

• TenantId1_Products
• TenantId2_Products
• TenantId3_Products

A new tenant should be able to register itself and EF migrations should trigger their set of tables to be created in the database.

I know it's probably a long-shot, but would this at all be possible with EF core? All I can find are examples of dynamic connectionstrings to separate databases.

Answer 1

The way you are doing this will ultimately be the same or higher as a separate database per tenant. This is usually done via a Customer_ID field to the like which will separate this at a row level (and then be included on every query).

Otherwise you might as well have separate databases so that you get better separation/isolation etc. The extra isolation is particularly nice if you want to scale customers by migrating them to a different/larger environment.

The model you are talking about is actually the worst of both worlds, incurring the costs of separate databases, without the benefits of data-driven multi-tenancy.