Introduction to the Solution

EclipseLink offers considerable flexibility in how you can design and implement features for isolating tenants. Possibilities include the following:

Application Isolation options

• Separate container/server

• Separate application within the same container/server

• Separate entity manager factory and shared cache within the same application

• Shared entity manager factory with tenant isolation per entity manager

Data isolation options

• Separate database

• Separate schema/tablespace

• Separate tables

• Shared table with row isolation

• Query filtering

• Oracle Virtual Private Database (VPD)

EclipseLink includes the following options for providing multi-tenancy in the data source:

• Single-table multi-tenancy allows tenants to share tables. Each tenant has its own rows, identified by discriminator columns, and those rows are invisible to other tenants. See Using Single-Table Multi-Tenancy.

• With table-per-tenant multi-tenancy, each tenant has its own table or tables, identified by table tenant discriminators, and those tables are invisible to other users. See Using Table-Per-Tenant Multi-Tenancy.

• With (VDP) multi-tenancy, tenants use a VDP database, which provides the functionality to support multiple tenants sharing the same table. See Using VPD Multi-Tenancy.

EclipseLink further provides tenant-specific extensions through extensible entities using extensible entities and MetadataSource. For information about those features, see Chapter 12, "Making JPA Entities and JAXB Beans Extensible," and Chapter 13, "Using an External MetaData Source."