Lead Programmer Mike Dalessio shares the benefits of multi-tenant databases and how his work with Fizzy led to the the Active Record Tenanted gem.

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37signals Dev

Mike Dalessio discusses 37signals' journey building multi-tenant Rails applications with separate SQLite databases per customer. He demonstrates the Active Record Tenanted gem, which simplifies converting existing Rails apps to multi-tenant architecture with built-in safety checks to prevent data leaks. The team originally planned this for Fizzy but switched to MySQL due to time constraints around global replication and failover. The gem handles database connections, fragment caching, file storage, and Action Cable tenanting automatically, requiring minimal code changes to existing applications.

37signals Dev — Rails Multi-Tenancy