The Force.com Multitenant Architecture: Understanding the Design of Salesforce.com’s Internet Application Development Platform

Partitioning of Data and Metadata

All Force.com data, metadata, and pivot table structures, including underlying database indexes, are physically partitioned by OrgID (by tenant) using native database partitioning mechanisms. Data partitioning is a proven technique that database systems provide to physically divide large logical data structures into smaller, more manageable pieces. Partitioning can also help to improve the performance, scalability, and availability of a large database system such as a multitenant environment. For example, by definition, every Force.com application query targets a specific tenant’s information, so the query optimizer need only consider accessing data partitions that contain a tenant’s data rather than an entire ...