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IBM Cloudant

IBM Cloudant

Overview

What is IBM Cloudant?

Cloudant is an open source non-relational, distributed database service that requires zero-configuration. It's based on the Apache-backed CouchDB project and the creator of the open source BigCouch project. Cloudant's service provides integrated data management, search, and analytics engine designed for web…

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Recent Reviews

Win-Win for IBM Cloud

9 out of 10
April 18, 2021
Incentivized
We were using IBM Cloudant as our cloud storage platform for a project where we were collecting real-time environmental data. Later, we …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 7 features
  • Concurrency (21)
    9.9
    99%
  • Performance (21)
    9.8
    98%
  • Security (21)
    9.8
    98%
  • Availability (21)
    8.1
    81%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Standard

$1

Cloud
per month per GB of storage above the included 20 GB

Standard

$75

Cloud
per month 100 reads/second ; 50 writes/second ; 5 global queries/second

Lite

Free

Cloud
20 reads/second ; 10 writes/second ; 5 global queries / second ; 1 GB of storage capacity

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.ibm.com/cloud/cloudant/pric…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Features

NoSQL Databases

NoSQL databases are designed to be used across large distrusted systems. They are notably much more scalable and much faster and handling very large data loads than traditional relational databases.

9.4
Avg 8.8
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Product Details

What is IBM Cloudant?

IBM Cloudant is a distributed database that is optimized for handling heavy workloads that are typical of large, fast-growing web and mobile apps. Available as an SLA-backed, fully managed IBM Cloud service, Cloudant elastically scales throughput and storage independently. Cloudant is also available as a downloadable on-premises installation, and its API and replication protocol are compatible with an open source ecosystem that includes CouchDB, PouchDB and libraries for the most popular web and mobile development stacks.

IBM Cloudant Features

NoSQL Databases Features

  • Supported: Performance
  • Supported: Availability
  • Supported: Concurrency
  • Supported: Security
  • Supported: Scalability
  • Supported: Data model flexibility
  • Supported: Deployment model flexibility

IBM Cloudant Video

database management with Cloudant

IBM Cloudant Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported LanguagesEnglish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese/Brazil, Spanish, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional

Frequently Asked Questions

Cloudant is an open source non-relational, distributed database service that requires zero-configuration. It's based on the Apache-backed CouchDB project and the creator of the open source BigCouch project. Cloudant's service provides integrated data management, search, and analytics engine designed for web applications. Cloudant scales your database on the CouchDB framework and provides hosting, administrative tools, analytics and commercial support for CouchDB and BigCouch. Cloudant is often considered part of a new generation of 'NoSQL' databases that don't require fixed table schemas and is challenging the dominance of traditional relational databases (including the popular MySQL).

Amazon DynamoDB, MongoDB, and Couchbase Server are common alternatives for IBM Cloudant.

Reviewers rate Concurrency and Data model flexibility highest, with a score of 9.9.

The most common users of IBM Cloudant are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(123)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 45)
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Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I have primarily used [IBM] Cloudant to facilitate academic and non-profit research.
  • It’s a very powerful tool!
  • I never worry about the security and safety of data.
  • Data is easily retrieved for analysis.
  • No suggestions for improvement
[IBM Cloudant is] perfect for data storage and peace of mind for security and safety.
Orion Salazar | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
Software development and cloud storage from IBM
  • Stay up to date with the ever changing market
  • Fast and reliable
  • Easy to use
  • Great customer service
  • I think for now it works great I think it can scale further than it already has with the outstanding company IBM is and how much it means to the world as other things with time it should grow!
It’s really great for mobile developers and the development they do and also web based development as well! It makes it easier to get the job done and that’s convenient for time but not only that it’s great for the continued growth all around as businesses strive to be better for the consumer each and every day!
Jan Johannes | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I recommend everyone who evaluated ibm cloudant in the past years since the cloudant aquisition and decided against it due to reliability and maturity of ibm cloud to revisit cloudant. For the last 2 years I can say nothing but positives about the experience and i moved all in-house couchDB and document database hosting to ibm without any issues at all. As a sidenote i was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the fulltext and faceting features of cloudant and even have some workloads handled by cloudant that i previously fullfilled with a separate elastic search installation. This was planned as an intermediate solution but cloudant search worked so well, that it is now a standard part of our solution stack.<br>
  • sync data with multi master setups and offline capable clients
  • schema-less document storage
  • subscription and reactivity to changing data
  • ibm cloud billing is still a bit strict and inflexible for some markets and credit card providers, i needed to verify my company and the process could have been nicer.
perfect for schema-less document needs especially if accessing via http anyways, irreplaceable as soon as multi master or local first (eg. latency critical) clients come into the mix!

high performance/ latency critical joins that cannot be implemented with denormalized data are better done in other systems.

cloudant search does not provide all features of elastic search and can get a bit pricey for many concurrent global quieries that dont work partitioned.
November 09, 2022

My words on IBM cloudant

Pankaj Choudhary | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I used the ibm cloudant database to store the data, actually i want to store the data in nosql and cloudant is a no sql database, So its resoved my data storage issue. We can create n number of collection in a single data base and can access seperately to fulfill the purpose.
  • Filter by indexing
  • Data storage
  • Nosql
  • In schema prepration
  • Indexing to filter
  • Tabular view of stored data
It's very easy to implement the IBM cloud and database in the rest API we can also view the data in the form of table. We can also create the query on the IBM cloudant panel to use in our program that provide a very easy way to developer software in iffective time frame.
Michael Adler | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Cloudant like I use Couchdb. Each user has a database and I like the ease of use with authentication as well as falling back on Couchdb defaults if wanting to do so. I deal with real-time wait data and use pouchdb to handle my front end.
  • Ease of use coming from Couchdb - views, indexes, auth, revisions
  • Uptime has been excellent
  • Replication with ease
  • Better branding - People not used to using IBM services don’t know that Cloudant [was] built around Couchdb.
  • Documentation can be done a bit more organized (some are very old) and do share more of [the] fallback features that Couchdb supplies and what is offered too. I have to sometimes look deep to find out things like fallback auth to use Couchdb auth users for example. Simple stuff.
  • I honestly over time have really no other issues and they aren’t anything extensive since I know Couchdb well.
  • I [have] been happy so far.
I work in Erlang stack so Couchdb and Rabbitmq are my go-to tech stack. In this area, I highly recommend [it], it is easy.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used the IBM Cloudant in two scenarios: One, for a simple place to persist text to be displayed in a chatbot that played nicely with the rest of our IBM Cloud stack, particularly with IBM Cloud Functions; and the other, a database with a simple enough query language for non-engineers to learn — which should also work nicely with IBM Cloud Functions and have a built-in, easy to use GUI
  • Integration with Cloud Functions
  • Included GUI for non-engineers
  • Fixed, throughput/expected use-based pricing
  • Better documentation
  • Expensive pricing for very small projects
  • Better tabular views
Our organization found Cloudant most suitable if One, a fixed pricing structure would make the most sense, for example in a situation where the project Cloudant is being used in makes its revenue in procurement or fixed retainer — thus the predictability of costs is paramount; Two, where you need to frequently edit the data and/or share access to the query engine to non-engineers — this is where the GUI shines.
September 22, 2021

IBM Cloudant review

Jagmeet singh | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our department uses IBM Cloudant as a distributed NoSQL database solution for web-based applications. IBM Cloudant allows rapid writes of unstructured JSON data received on a second-by-second basis also it is NoSQL so it is not required to take care of [the] schema of the table application. It also allows effective use of map-reduce to aggregate results out of collections defined within IBM Cloudant databases, allowing for millions of records to be aggregated and used effectively for analytics and reporting.
  • IBM Cloudant allows rapid writes of unstructured JSON data received on a second-by-second basis.
  • It also allows effective use of map-reduce to aggregate results out of collections defined within IBM Cloudant databases, allowing for millions of records to be aggregated and used effectively for analytics and reporting.
  • Simple and straight forward to use and embed into the application.
  • Limited support/documentation for programming languages such as Python, Perl, and R.
  • Time to index large databases needs to be improved.
IBM Cloudant is useful when some applications require [a] powerful NoSQL database where performance analytics is the key to business. It will be less appropriate where storage sizes of [an] application [are] huge as pricing on storage sizes as database size increases exponentially.
Ramindu Deshapriya | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our organization uses IBM Cloudant as a distributed NoSQL database solution for implementation on client applications in the Internet of Things space. IBM Cloudant allows rapid writes of unstructured JSON data received from IoT devices on a second-by-second basis. It also allows effective use of map-reduce to aggregate results out of collections defined by within IBM Cloudant databases, allowing for millions of records to be aggregated and used effectively for analytics and reporting.
  • Rapid writes
  • Map reduce
  • High storage capacity
  • High availability
  • Time to index large databases needs to be improved
  • Could use more structure in terms of separating entities within a database
  • Better pricing on storage sizes as database size increases exponentially
IBM Cloudant is the best implementation of CouchDB, or any NoSQL database that you could use if you are looking for a database that can handle extremely rapid writes to a database without having to worry about transactional integrity. IBM Cloudant also abstracts out CouchDB's replication/multi-node requirements and ensures high availability on its own. It also allows map-reduce based indexing which will allow massive databases to be aggregated and queried very quickly. It should not be used in cases where you require structured data which is organized according to a schema, or if you want to maintain ACID database properties.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use IBM Cloudant for the hospital mobile health application. We also use IBM Cloudant as our primary database backup system and I can say everything has been working well. The IBM Cloudant uptime and search features are what make it best as our database backup system. IBM Cloudant delivers high-level service.
  • Perfect query interface
  • Great uptime
  • The support team is amazing
  • Great documentation
  • Easy setup
  • Less IBM Cloudant database management features
  • The analytic reports seems off to me
  • Downloading data from IBM Cloudant [I feel] can sometimes be a painful process.
A good scenario where IBM Cloudant is irresistible is when you are an international company and have web and mobile-based applications - accessing data will be easy thanks to the global availability of IBM Cloudant. It will be easy to connect to the closest data center.
Another scenario is where you have mobile and web-based apps and/or want to have a data backup system - IBM Cloudant works perfectly well.
Jerry Ebherson Sanchez Aguado | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
IBM Cloudant is used to have a central repository of clients' databases to which information generated in different branches that have local Couchdb deployments arrivals. In this way, we manage to have the data synchronized in all of them through continuous replication.
  • The response time for bi-directional syncs with the Couchdb engine is excellent.
  • The statistics provided by Cloudant allow us to make decisions about the implementation of new features or improvements over existing ones in future versions of our software, allowing us to continuously optimize processes.
  • Improvement in the documentation of some client libraries, such as the Cloudant library for Java.
The deployment for bidirectional replications in the database through Cloudant is the scenario that we have used the most and with which we are very satisfied.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
To deploy an application with continuous delivery using NodeJS and Cloudant in IBM cloud. The entire organization of almost 1000 people has used these services to develop and deploy the services. This is a great platform to create continuous delivery mode applications. Cloudant is a very important database in the IBM Cloud to make connections for all applications in the cloud. Great experience with the Cloudant database.
  • Continuous delivery process
  • Development easy
  • Deployment easy
  • Testing also done
  • It is an automated process
  • No issues
It is the best service to create web applications in a continuous delivery model.
Nicolas Peeters | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Cloudant allows us to scale our data layer without worrying about the operations side of things to manage such a big cluster. Cloudant is the main database system for our company. It's business critical for our company and our many customers rely on its performance on a daily basis to perform their activities.
  • Scale your data layer without issues.
  • Great support team.
  • Very few operational problems
  • No detailed monitoring (which views are used or not, performance metrics) on top of the basic stuff provided by CouchDB
  • No playground environment to test some very large map/reduce queries (and therefore any changes in the design have to reindex the whole DB).
  • Pricing is quite steep
  • No integrated backup features, as you'd expect from an enterprise product
It is less suited for reporting. Reporting is an issue. This is a general issue with document-based NoSQL systems, but there's no real solution provided by IBM for this (apart from "dump to a SQL database"). It's very well suited for a document-based system and we of course rely very much on the replication capabilities.
April 18, 2021

Win-Win for IBM Cloud

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We were using IBM Cloudant as our cloud storage platform for a project where we were collecting real-time environmental data. Later, we used this raw data for data manipulation and data visualization. The data was collected using a physical custom-made IOT sensor that was connected to IBM Cloud. The purpose of this product was to aid impact investors to make guided, data backed decisions.
  • Easy collaboration with IBM Cloud.
  • Data easily downloadable in required format.
  • Easy to use UI.
  • More flexibility in displaying data stored.
  • More ways of visualizing data.
  • Performing data manipulation options.
It is greatly suited when working on IBM Cloud due to its easy connectivity and synchronization.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Cloudant to store production data used in analytics/machine learning models. We run an agricultural management platform to help farmers improve efficiency and reduce risk.
  • Easily accessible via the IBM Cloud dashboard.
  • Ease of integration with IoT and analytics products.
  • Decent interface
  • Poor backup and recovery tools.
  • Not easy to sort data.
Ease of integration with IBM Cloud services. Poor data management capability.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Cloudant for replicate data from our Blockchain platform. With Cloudant we can make queries and reports for our managers that want to see how the transactions in blockchain are working. It's very user friendly and it's stable too. Without it we did not have any visibility of the transactions.
  • User Friendly
  • High availability
  • High tolerance
  • Load Balancing
  • Manage blob objects
  • Client APIs
If you want to replicate other databases and make them available for reports or for APIs to query data. Without these solutions, all development will not work. Its a very good product with great customer support from IBM, in many ways help us improve the performance of the queries that our application use
Jan-Willem Steur | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use IBM Cloudant primarily in our Watson IoT Platform, in combination with IBM Cloud Pak and Node-Red to receive and store IoT sensor data. It is used across a significant part of our organization, since we are an IBM Business partner for the entire IBM Maximo software stack. Everywhere IOT or Predictive Maintenance Insights is involved we make use of WIOTP in combination with IBM Cloudand.
  • Watson IoT Platform--ease of use
  • IBM Cloud Pak and Cloud Foundry apps--fast service connection
  • Fast recovery
  • Easy to merge databases
  • API connectivity especially in combination with Node-Red causes too many connectivity errors / token errors.
  • Sometimes it is difficult to store images (BLOB files). We always need to figure out how it was working. A better guidance/instruction on this would be appreciated
When you need fast and easy use of Cloudant, we recommend to use IBM Cloudant as a simple GUI-based data storage tool. IBM Cloudant can do much more and has an impressive backbone. Of cause it isn't comparable with a database like DB2, but is enough for storage of, for instance, IOT data.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Cloudant is being used as the main storage system for all my current projects. Being able to easily retrieve and publish data to Cloudant over a standard and proven protocol has made it much easier to implement storage in any language and system required. Having such easily available storage has sped up the entire development process greatly.
  • Support has been great addressing any issues.
  • The documentation is very easy and straight forward to follow.
  • The many storage locations and migration capabilities allow for quick and easy access to data wherever needed.
  • Not supporting temporary views can be limiting at times.
Do you need to provide easy access to data directly to end users?
Do you need remote storage with easy to follow documentation?
Do you already use NoSQL in any other projects?
Is JSON the data you wish to be able to storage and index easily?
Do you need to be able to easily replicate your database stores?
Do you need to share your database with multiple users?
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I'm using Cloudant as a persistent backend to a web app that leverages PouchDB. It is easy to query and seamlessly synchronizes the app data to the cloud.
  • Easy to configure and operate through the GUI.
  • Seamless replication to CouchDB (like PouchDB).
  • The multi-tentant option is free for low utilization (HTTP requests and storage).
  • Instant database compaction on multi-tenant.
Cloudant is easy to use and has a high adherence to CouchDB-like databases, which is awesome for those moving into the NoSQL space.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used IBM Cloudant as a distributed, fully managed JSON database for IoT use cases. API integration was a must, and all the support to Apache CouchDB made a positive difference. Overall support and documentation from IBM Cloudant were satisfactory, as well as pricing. Global availability was generally good, except for China. Availability and SLAs were never a problem and the platform has always been stable.
  • API integration and support through CouchDB standards.
  • Managed Services.
  • Global availability, especially in Asia.
  • IBM Cloudant support is generally robust, but in some occasions we had to find solutions by ourselves.
IBM Cloudant is generally a good tool for a NonSQL, document oriented Database as a Service. It is very scalable and reliable, and managed services through IBM seems to be working well. You can consider as almost no lock-in since it is based on CouchDB API structures and you can migrate to any other provider in the future if needed. If you need real Global Availability, like Asia / China you may need to look for alternatives.
November 11, 2019

IBM Cloudant is great!

Brandon Stephan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Cloudant as an IBM proposed DB solution for dedicated cloud foundry IBM cloud environments. The initial structure is for a weird implementation to use Cloudant, as we are using it as a cache for some middle life data. I know cache is not the right implementation for Cloudant, but it offered database sync between datacenters.
  • For us, performance and scalability is the key, and Cloudant DB backed by CouchDB is scalable and performant.
  • IBM Cloudant dB is very easy to provision for sandbox, development, QA as well as production.
  • Limited support for popular programming languages such as Python, Perl, and R.
  • No support for SQL.
  • No support for XML.
  • The lack of memory capabilities.
We use it across the board. We are a cloud-based solution provider and our products are deployed on the IBM cloud and we used IBM Cloudant as a database (persistent) storage. We use it across the board to store anything that needs persistent storage, from text to images and document attachments as well.
Saket Nalegaonkar | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Currently, it's being used by our E-commerce Team, which spans all our digital solutions. It's currently used along with the Node-Red instance hosted within the IBM environment with multiple such instances supporting multiple Cloudant databases for all the database and storage-related facilities. IBM Cloudant helps manage it and is a very easy to adapt format helping with quick deployments.
  • It is NoSQL
  • It has better performance than Mongo Atlas
  • Queries are easy to use and support for views is also helpful
  • Speed of searching through records can be improved.
  • Some ML to predict enhancement in queries can surely help IBM and clients mutually target optimal solutions.
  • Views accepting multiple parameters.
It is currently being used by our e-commerce team, which spans all our digital solutions. Used along with the node-red instance hosted within the IBM environment. With multiple such instances supporting multiple Cloudant databases for all storage/database facilities, it is very easy to manage.
August 29, 2019

Best for mobile

Victor Pease Solano | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Cloudant is the database for all our mobile applications with offline-first architecture, and it's the best option to keep everything synced and secure.

This is the best way to use CouchDB, because Cloudant adds the authorization layer required for a real live app, and also the infinite capacity with the flexibility to grow from $0 to whatever is required according to the amount of users you need to support.

Also, we have now using Cloudant as the main database for data capture apps and the source for all our catalogs in order to free resources from our rdbms system.

Finally, considering CouchDB is part of Bluemix, you will have the chance to grow, adding on more services for your app.
  • Authentication improved with the API keys
  • Synchronization with https, which means secure and trustable syncs
  • Scale in a transparent way
  • Free start with the $50 allowance makes Cloudant the best way to start
  • It would be nice to have a way to import bulk data
  • There must be a better way to check usage. There are a lot of transactions not shown in the actual report
  • There must be a way to reset a db -- a way to set the actual data as the base and eliminate all deleted docs
Cloudant is best suited for offline first apps, with a library on the client -- you can have a completely synced environment in no time with data isolation per user and everything.

It is not so good for report apps or to handle too much structured data, because the Cloudant query can turn in something tricky, specially if your data model gets complicated.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Cloudant as an IBM proposed DB solution for dedicated cloud foundry IBM cloud environments. The initial structure is for a weird implementation to use Cloudant, as we are using it as a cache for some middle life data. I know cache is not a right implementation for Cloudant, but it offered a database sync between datacenters.
  • Cross datacenters sync
  • Quick sync performance and data transfer
  • Some pretty high add/update response time
  • We had some issues with concurrent data saving/reading
  • Due to CouchDB implementation the purge of some database field requires a copy of the desired fields to a new database
  • Could find an easier way to assign access permission
As a incremental database I think the best use case is to store a sequential path of data events - like transactions storage.
February 22, 2019

IBM Cloudant Experience

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used as a noSQL database across the organization for big data analytics and is used amongst other things for text analytics as it permits unlimited index fields.
  • Coudant allows unlimited secondary index fields when compared to others that have certain limitations.
  • Cloudant also has the ability to do bi-directional sync for replication and synchronization.
  • Cloudant can run on bare metal and virtual machines.
  • Cloudant can also be deployed in multi-user or private cloud environments.
  • very easy to program and build apps
  • Sometimes, there are no slower response times [than] when trying to pull records - I mean that slowness is in terms of milli-seconds :-)
  • I wish it has in memory computing capability
  • XML is still not supported by this product
Cloudant is best suited for highly scalable environments as it comes with data base as a service. It has more flexibility than some of the other noSQL databases and the response time to pull data is much faster than others. It is easy to stage and get started for both test and production environment. It also has graph data base capability.
February 15, 2019

Cloudant Review

Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have been using Cloudant as part of a CEAN stack for various different prototypes that we build for different clients, we mainly use Cloudant because it is hosted in the cloud and has a free tier for when we are only experimenting.
  • Adding and deleting documents in the UI is intuitive
  • The UI is helpful for managing the data
  • It is hosted on the cloud and doesn’t require much set up to get going
  • The @Cloudant/Cloudand npm SDK has very limited functionality when compared to MongoDB, the Cloudant queries that can be made with JSON is good however, but it is not obvious from the start that you can do this.
The key for us is to see examples of this database being used at scale to show that it is a proven technology and also examples of where a NoSQL DB is best used
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