[karmajunkie]

Couple of scenarios come to mind...

1) Its super common even in multitenant systems to have a common database with configuration information (for example) which serves all tenants, and tenant-specific databases used alongside that to host their private data.

2) Back when sharding started to be a popular scaling pattern, tenants were not always split up by the tenant boundary but by some other reliable key. Obviously this isn't true multitenancy and I think most DBAs would discourage the pattern today. However, given the age of the products at Atlassian (and assuming a fast-and-loose engineering culture, which has been alluded to elsewhere) its entirely possible that parts of these products as well as the entire product itself may use this kind of sharding.

Bottom line, we can only hypothesize unless and until someone from Atlassian actually details their architecture (which may have happened? I dunno, I haven't been paying that much attention to it…)

[JohnBooty]

    1) Its super common even in multitenant 
    systems to have a common database with 
    configuration information (for example) 
    which serves all tenants, and tenant-specific 
    databases used alongside that to host their 
    private data.

Yeah, for sure. This is definitely what I'd expect to see, but I would also expect that to make individual client restores pretty easy, assuming the individual client backups themselves weren't trashed.

One wouldn't imagine that the shared config database would have a dependency on any of the individual client databases and that they could therefore be moved/dropped/restored at will, independently of the shared config database.

    2) Back when sharding started to be a popular 
    scaling pattern, tenants were not always split 
    up by the tenant boundary but by some other 
    reliable key. 

I guess that makes sense. I mean, after all, it does allow large/demanding clients to span multiple databases I guess.