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Shardines: SQLite3 Database-per-Tenant with ActiveRecord

Published on: 2025-08-07 09:16:59

A Can of Shardines: SQLite Multitenancy With Rails There is a pattern I am very fond of - “one database per tenant” in web applications with multiple, isolated users. Recently, I needed to fix an application I had for a long time where this database-per-tenant multitenancy utterly broke down, because I was doing connection management wrong. Which begat the question: how do you even approach doing it right? And it turns out I was not alone in this. The most popular gem for multitenancy - Apartment - which I have even used in my failed startup back in the day - has the issue too. The culprit of does not handle multithreading very well is actually deeper. Way deeper. Doing runtime-defined multiple databases with Rails has only recently become less haphazard, and there are no tools either via gems or built-in that facilitate these flows. It has also accrued a ton of complexity, and also changes with every major Rails revision. TL;DR If you need to do database-per-tenant multitenancy wi ... Read full article.