Bakery
decouples the multisites — if you're sharing a table, you must use exactly the same Drupal version on all sites in the multisite configuration, and update them in lockstep. With Bakery
, the Master and Slaves can be running different Drupal versions. Additionally, any modules that modify the users
table on the Master site would need to be applied to the Slave sites with corresponding settings.
Bakery
improves scalability — user accounts are not created on slave sites until they are needed, conserving server computational and data storage resources.
Bakery
synchronizes sessions — for example, if the user logs out of one Bakery site, the user will be logged out of all Bakery sites in that group. (To achieve equivalent behavior with shared tables, you'd also need to share the sessions
table, which would further complicate maintenance.)