Notion does something similar, sharding postgres grouped by their tenants. It takes a huge effort and preparation to get it right, both at the application and infra level. Link: https://www.notion.so/blog/sharding-postgres-at-notion

Exactly that! Notion, Figma, Loom, Slack, Discord, Sentry have all been an inspiration toward the problem we are trying to solve.

Data isolation, recovery, backups are a big problem in the world of SaaS, especially at huge scale. Companies end up hiring a dedicated infra team to handle such issues.

Makes sense, but if you're doing multi-tenancy, why not deploy a postgres database for each user so co-mingling is not even possible? That would make on-prem deployments easier to migrate to as well.

> why not deploy a postgres database for each user so co-mingling is not even possible

This is the approach we took and I think it helps with IT review docs.

Nile lets you do this without incurring the operational complexity of managing multiple databases. We let you place the virtual tenant DB either on one multitenant Postgres DB or a dedicated Postgres. So, you can actually create a dedicated one for each of your tenant in Nile but interact with them like a single Postgres instance. We take care of schema updates across them, client-side routing and metadata management

> We let you place the virtual tenant DB either on one multitenant Postgres DB or a dedicated Postgres.

Sounds promising, but by "a dedicated Postgres." do you mean a different server or just a different db on the same server? I'm trying to get at how the cost would change between the two solutions. Right now we can run N databases on the same Postgres server for roughly the same cost as running a single multitenant db. Switching to "server per customer" seems like it would be cost prohibitive.

We are going to support a database in the same server initially but could also provide dedicated server in the future. The nice thing about Nile's design is that we can provide different placements for different cost profiles with the developer experience of a single Postgres instance.

Nice! Thanks for the response.

How does the vector embedding work? Do you store the embeddings per tenant and let the application search for it?

Nile CEO here. Yes, you can store embeddings per tenant and search for it. You can read more about vector embeddings and how we support it here https://www.thenile.dev/docs/ai-embeddings