Multi-Tenant Customizable Databases

There is a need for Multi-Tenant Customizable OLTP systems, because many companies seek to outsource IT activities, but are nonetheless in need of highly customizable transaction processing software. Such systems need a Multi-Tenant Customizable Database (MTC-DB) as a backing. To stimulate the development of such databases, we propose the benchmark MTCB. We present a specification and an example implementation in Java 8. We believe that this benchmark is a valuable contribution to the community of MTC-DB developers, because it provides objective comparability as well as a precise definition of the concept of MTC-DB. Furthermore, we designed four MTC-DB implementations on top of a traditional relational database: two Field Based approaches and two Row Based approaches. Our evaluation using the developed benchmark shows mixed results: each implementation scores well on some metrics, and poor on others. Future work should try to combine the four implementations and develop a smart query planner that can decide which execution method is best for each individual query.