The design of the force.com multitenant internet application development platform

ABSTRACT

Force.com is the preeminent on-demand application development platform in use today, supporting some 55,000+ organizations. Individual enterprises and commercial software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors trust the platform to deliver robust, reliable, Internet-scale applications. To meet the extreme demands of its large user population, Force.com's foundation is a metadatadriven software architecture that enables multitenant applications.

The focus of this paper is multitenancy, a fundamental design approach that can dramatically improve SaaS application management. This paper defines multitenancy, explains its benefits, and demonstrates why metadata-driven architectures are the premier choice for implementing multitenancy.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.1 Logical Design
          Subjects: Data models

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.11 Software Architectures
            Subjects: Languages (e.g., description, interconnection, definition); Data abstraction

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Performance

Keywords:
domain specific language, flex schema, multi-tenancy, object-relational mapping, query optimization