Category: CRUD

Multi-tenancy – Design Options

Some personal notes on different options for managing multi-tenancy

Silo – Different databases for each tenant. Again PHPRunner has an excellent solution for this.

Siloed Database with one Front End PHPRunner

Bridging – Unique schema for each tenant – for me this I can’t see any great advantages to this and quite a lot of extra required work.

Row Level Security – Tenancy managed by the database – One database additional column in tables that record the tenant and prior to showing results of query the database will filter results by tenant. Policy set up with unique user for each tenant. Postgres applicable. Still requires an additional field in all the tables but it is nice to have and can be extremely quick to implement.

Client Software – Client side implemented tenancy – PHP Runner has an option to implement Row Level Security in the design of the front end.

Amazon Web Services article on Multi-tenancy

Some points – for postgres implementing Row Level Security on tables does not carry through to the views which is a major issue for me. There are way rounds it though. It would be great to have the database managing the row level security and if you have all your tenants in one database possibly the best way to do it is using the below.

How to Add Row Level Security to Views in PostgreSQL

PHPRunner by Xlinesoft – a personal recommendation if you need a Low Code platform perfect for CRUD application development

Bit of background I am like most , constantly looking out for better tools and have been periodically searching Google for low code tools now for nearly 5 years. 3 years ago I started dipping my toe into web code generators and then about 2 and a half years ago I went out and bought tools linked to Xlinesoft – I have copies of both ASP.net runner and PHPrunner and I thought I would give some feedback. It seems to me incredibly difficult to get unbiased reviews of low code platforms. If you do a search for it on google you only seem to find the really big (and expensive players) who don’t clearly indicate how good they are for CRUD application generation. The main generators I looked at were Nubuilder (open source but only supports MYSQL databases and it doesn’t produce responsive designs) – PHPMaker – not bad but wasn’t getting great performance and didn’t like the UI of the genrator that much / Radzen – good but ASP NET based and its a bit young at the moment.

Xlinesoft Main Website

Word up – I basically think Xlinesoft’s PHPRunner is particularly excellent. I have copies of ASP NET Runner and PHPRunner but found because I can get better performance with PHPRunner and because Linux hosting is cheaper I am moving all my applications across to PHPRunner. Their ASP Net Runner has served me well and I had one client on it and they are very happy. I still plan to move them across to PHPRunner.

I have managed to create 5 working applications and I am starting to get independent clients who I make applications for. To date they have been very happy with my work and are usually very happy with how quickly I can turn round their requests.

Points I would draw your attention to specific to PHPRunner.

  • Code produced is non proprietary and uses vanilla PHP.
  • PHP 7.4 support is standard and PHP 8 support is being introduced. I generally use the latest PHP version my host provides an option for which to date has been 7.4. I am really looking forward to using it with PHP 8.
  • I’ve had no problem deploying the code to Linux web servers seems to work seamlessly. Previous versions of PHP are supported.
    Initial scaffolding of a connected database is fast and flawless. Every connected table gets a List / Add / Edit / View and Search page. This saves a massive amount of time in getting started.
  • So far I have connected to MySQL / Postgres and SQL Azure databases as the backends all seem to work well.
  • To date I have only used SQL Azure databases with Azure application service
  • I have had excellent performance between PHP Runner on a Azure Web App services and SQL Azure on Azure (even the basic developer level web app and database provisions)
  • I have had excellent performance between PHP Runner and MariaDB hosted on a linux paid host
  • I have had excellent performance between PHP Runner and Postgres where the web client is on a linux paid hosting service and postgres is on ACUGIS hosting service.
  • PHP Runner seems to deploy really really nicely to an apache server.
  • Security set up seem intuitive and clear but very powerful.
  • Two factor authentication is really easy to setup either via email or via SMS through a services such as Twilio
  • Additional applications are free there is no per seat option. If you are paying for a host where you have the option of unlimited subdomains it is likely that you will be able to get an application up and running for no additional monetary cost.
  • Setting up email is really easy.
  • Code behind for events is very intuitive and extremely intuitive only thing that will hold you back is your ability to code.
  • Charting seems good – I haven’t used it extensively but works as I expected it too and pretty.
  • The menu setup either the initial screen or a tree setup is very flexible and extremely intuitive
  • Like I said the generated code is not proprietary so no need to fuss with security tokens or things like that.

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