Here is a peculiar one:

One of our products allows users to create "projects" that are stored in SQL Server, and currently we set one database per project, so that we can backup, restore and manage those projects separately. We name the databases in a way that maps directly to the project ID, so we may have databases named p1, p2 and so on.

Some of our customers may have several thousands of those projects, which means several thousand databases, some containing large amounts of data but some very little data ("ad-hoc projects"), and the management of so many databases may get complex to our customers.

We are currently investigating the possibility of reducing the number of databases. One of the options considered was use of database schemas and filegroups, but that is really a security feature and complicates on the maintenance side. Another option is of course extensive use of prefixes and have everything in the same database, but that is just no elegant way of doing it.

What I was wondering here is if yet another option (and the best one) could be to somehow come up with a some sort of binary database provider that basically stores a complete database as a set of binary (blob) fields. With a GUID, timestamp and a few other additional fields, it would also be easy to import/export/backup rows representing entire databases without much hassle.

Any opinions, tips and resources on this are very much appreciated.

Thanks