This seems to be an architecture Cloudflare is aiming to support with their SQLite service. One database per customer, each database located in the customer’s primary region.
I've been calling it the Lots of Little Databases model vs the Globe Spanning Gorilla.
Like the Spanner paper points out, even if your distributed database semantically appears like a single giant instance, in practice performance means developers avoid using distributed joins, etc, because these can lead to shuffling very large amounts of intermediate results across the network. So the illusion of being on a single giant machine ends up leaking through the reality, and people end up writing workarounds for distributed joins like async materialization.
If we give up the single machine illusion we get a lot of simplification, at the cost of features devs were unlikely to use anyhow. I see having consistent distributed commit but without cross shard joins as a really interesting alternative.
And besides scalability I like the extra security rope of fine grained partitioning from the start.
I'll write a blog post along these lines if I get anything worthwhile done.
You have to create each database manually using wrangler or the website. Then you have to create a binding for each database in wrangler.toml so that the database becomes accessible as a variable in your Workers code. Then you have to change your Worker source code to do something with that variable. Then you redeploy.
The issue is that Workers cannot create or list databases. There's no API for it.
In the meantime, though it's not a great solution, one can create and query databases through the REST API instead https://developers.cloudflare.com/api/operations/cloudflare-...
That's great to hear, thanks!