Re: IBM i in the cloud (was social media)

Nathan Andelin wrote:

Would you create an intelligent connection pool manager to
determine which tenant each request belongs to?

That would make a lot of sense. I don't think the default JDBC
connection pool in JT400 can handle that kind of thing, but it shouldn't
be too hard to create your own.

Could we explore that idea a little further? And just to reiterate a little bit of background to keep things in context, we're talking about using a single IBM i box to handle requests for multiple tenants who each have their own separate database collection (library). So we're exploring the idea of writing a connection pool manager to return a connection to a DB server instance which would use the appropriate library list for the requesting tenant.

What scope would you recommend for the connection manager? Scoped to a single servlet? Scoped to a package of Servlets? Scoped to a WAS instance?

-Nathan

Nathan,

FWIW,
We developed a cross platform solution to this issue as follows:
1. Each tenant is associated with a library(s) (or schema on other DBs) as part of a database driven authentication. Library is stored with user session after authentication.

2. All SQL statements include a variable replacement library. For example: "SELECT A,B,C from ??!LIB_NAME/customers where x > y"
3. All SQL statements pass thru a single component that can replace the library with a REAL tenant library (along with other security checks, etc) At runtime, this becomes: "SELECT A,B,C from ACME/customers where x > y"

This works for us on DB2, Oracle, SQL SERVER, and MYSQL since library list is a AS400 concept.
-Paul Holm