Multitenancy and Azure SQL Database

Multitenant solutions on Azure commonly use Azure SQL Database. On this page, we describe some of the features of Azure SQL Database that are useful when you design a multitenant system. We also link to guidance and examples for how to use Azure SQL in a multitenant solution.

Guidance

The Azure SQL Database team publishes extensive guidance on implementing multitenant architectures with Azure SQL Database. See Multi-tenant SaaS patterns with Azure SQL Database. Also, consider the guidance for partitioning Azure SQL databases.

Features of Azure SQL Database that support multitenancy

Azure SQL Database includes many features that support multitenancy.

Elastic pools

Elastic pools enable you to share compute resources between many databases on the same server. By using elastic pools, you can achieve performance elasticity for each database, while also achieving cost efficiency by sharing your provisioned resources across databases. Elastic pools provide built-in protections against the Noisy Neighbor problem.

More information:

Elastic database tools

The Sharding pattern enables you to scale your workload across multiple databases. Azure SQL Database provides tools to support sharding. These tools include the management of shard maps (a database that tracks the tenants assigned to each shard). THey also include initiating and tracking queries and management operations on multiple shards by using elastic jobs.

More information:

Row-level security

Row-level security is useful for enforcing tenant-level isolation, when you use shared tables.

More information:

Key management

The Always Encrypted feature provides the end-to-end encryption of your databases. If your tenants require they supply their own encryption keys, consider deploying separate databases for each tenant and consider enabling the Always Encrypted feature.

More information:

Contributors

This article is maintained by Microsoft. It was originally written by the following contributors.

Principal author:

  • Paul Burpo | Principal Customer Engineer, FastTrack for Azure
  • John Downs | Principal Software Engineer

Other contributors:

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Next steps

Review storage and data approaches for multitenancy.