Thanks for the comment. We have never had that type of issue in the seven years the platform has been operational.

The reason is that our data is segmented by tenant. In fact, we had to go to great lengths to enable cross-tenant data sharing, which included building a specific API that you would have to grant users access to a small data set and even then it is more akin to remote access of data, not commingling. It’s fundamentally not possible for tenant data to start “commingling” because of the way the metadata model is designed. It’s like a firewall.

In addition, because users on LongJump don’t have direct access to the database, only through the abstraction of metadata, they can never get to the table level of the database unless they are at the hosting ISV with access to the platform architecture and stack.

Also, in your example, that’s not “commingling.” That’s a programmatic error that someone might make and you still need authenticated access to reach that table in that tenant, which you likely won’t have.

It’s not hubris. It’s more like the law of physics. The only way around it is in your dreams or if you are a deity.

You basically bet your business on that every day, and expect your customers to do the same.

There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as all parties are fully aware of the possibility, however remote, of inter-customer data sharing. Databases, which you rely on, have been known to make mistakes. Doing “select * from table where CustomerID = 1234″ will generally work, but there exists the possibility that this will fail.

Denying that, or pretending that it’d never happen, is the height of hubris, surely?

Oh, and I have no association whatsoever with Larry Ellison or Oracle. I just don’t find the whole multitenancy structure satisfactory.

The well-managed internal data center generally does a good job holding the line on cost and meeting a well-defined SLA. However, innovation is not part of the picture. The only innovation you will find occurs when a supplier rolls out a software upgrade.

In the cloud – whether it is on Longjump’s PaaS, Amazon’s IaaS or Workday’s SaaS – the access to innovation is seamless. We all evolve together, for better (hopefully) but sometimes for worse (stay tuned – Gartner doesn’t call it the Peak of Inflated Expectations for nothing). My expectation is that the “for better” outweighs the “for worse” and the enterprise’s marriage to the cloud becomes a long-lasting value.

http://webappsatwork.blogspot.com/2009/02/helping-coghead-customers.html

Good to hear that Longjump is doing quite well and best of luck for continued growth. It won’t be surprising if Coghead isn’t the last one to fold.

Best.
Alain Yap
Morph Labs