Multi Tenancy

Multi-Tenancy

Treat tenant identity as an authorization boundary, not a query convenience.

Choose an isolation model

• Database per tenant: strongest isolation and highest operational cost.
• Schema per tenant: strong logical isolation with shared infrastructure.
• Shared schema with tenant_id: simplest operations, but every data path must enforce scope.
• Document the model and prohibit unrestricted repository access outside audited administration.

Resolve tenant identity

• Derive tenant from a verified token claim, trusted host mapping, or authenticated API key.
• Reject missing, unknown, disabled, or conflicting tenant identifiers.
• Never trust a public X-Tenant-Id header by itself.
• Clear servlet thread-local state in finally; use Reactor Context for reactive flows.

Enforce isolation

• Resolve tenant before opening a Hibernate session, transaction, or R2DBC connection.
• Include tenant in unique constraints, cache keys, idempotency keys, and object paths.
• Prevent cross-tenant joins and unrestricted native queries.
• Authorize support impersonation explicitly and audit the actor, tenant, reason, and duration.

Operations

• Run migrations per database/schema with resumable progress and version reporting.
• Propagate tenant explicitly into messages, scheduled jobs, batch parameters, and async tasks.
• Apply quotas and bounded tenant labels for noisy-neighbor visibility.
• Test attempted cross-tenant reads, writes, cache access, and job execution.

Examples

• See examples/good-tenant-filter.java and examples/bad-tenant-filter.java.

Official sources

• Hibernate multitenancy: https://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/orm/7.0/introduction/html_single/Hibernate_Introduction.html#multitenancy
• Reactor context: https://projectreactor.io/docs/core/release/reference/advancedFeatures/context.html

Gotchas

• Agent trusts caller-supplied tenant headers - derive tenant from authentication.
• Agent resolves tenant after the transaction starts - routing may already be fixed.
• Agent scopes SQL but not caches or idempotency records - data can still cross tenants.
• Agent leaks servlet ThreadLocal state - always clear it in finally.
• Agent uses tenant IDs as unbounded metric tags - keep IDs in logs/traces or aggregate metrics.