A method for tenant placement in a multi-tenant system is shown that includes creating a weighted graph of tenants and sharing relationships between tenants, where a weight for each tenant and each sharing relationship represents an associated degree of resource consumption; and adding one or more tenants to a database using a processor based on said weighted graph and a database capacity, such that the combined weight of the added tenants and the sharing relationships belonging to the added tenants are within the database capacity. If a tenant cannot be added to the database without exceeding the database capacity, a new database is created and the one or more tenants are added to the new database, subject to a new database capacity. The adding and creating steps are repeated until all tenants have been added to a database.