On-premises applications are mostly single-tenant. They support a single organization. We do occasionally see multi-tenant databases. They hold the same types of information for many organizations.
But what about SaaS based applications? By default, you’ll want to store data for many client organizations. Should you create a large single database that holds data for everyone? Should you create a separate database for each client? Or should you create something in-between.
As with most things in computing, there is no one simple answer to this. Here are the main decision points that I look at:
Click through for Greg’s thoughts on the matter. Most of these factors are also relevant for on-premises SQL Server installations, not just Azure SQL DB/Managed Instance.