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…
Outstanding Services and products!!!
Happily moved back to cloudant after hosting my own couchdb for a few years.
My words on IBM cloudant
Cloudant – I Use It With My Erlang Stack
A simple database with fully-featured GUI, "just works" scaling and replication, and straightforward pricing
IBM Cloudant review
IBM Cloudant is the best hosted CouchDB out there
IBM Cloudant - Great For Mobile and Web Based Applications
Great advantages and simplicity of deployment. It is as I would summarize the Cloudant service from IBM.
Great experience with Cloudant
Scaling our data layer without headaches
Win-Win for IBM Cloud
I like it, but not quite sure I love it
Cloudant the best companion to IBM Blockchain Platform
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
- Concurrency (21)9.999%
- Performance (21)9.898%
- Security (21)9.898%
- Availability (21)8.181%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
Standard
$1
Standard
$75
Lite
Free
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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.
- 9.8Performance(21) Ratings
How fast the database performs under data load
- 8.1Availability(21) Ratings
Availability is the probability that the NoSQL database will be available to preform its function when called upon.
- 9.9Concurrency(21) Ratings
Concurrency is the ability for multiple processes to access or change shared data simultaneously. The greater the number of concurrent user processes that can execute without blocking each other, the greater the concurrency of the database system.
- 9.8Security(21) Ratings
Security features include authentication against external security mechanisms liker LDAP, Windows Active Directory, and authorization or privilege management. Some NoSQL databases also support encryption.
- 9.1Scalability(21) Ratings
NoSQL databases are inherently more stable than relational databases and have built-in support for replication and partitioning of data to support scalability.
- 9.9Data model flexibility(21) Ratings
NoSQL databases do not rely on rely on tables, columns, rows, or schemas to organize and retrieve data, but use use more flexible data models to accommodate the large volume and variety of data being generated by modern applications.
- 9.1Deployment model flexibility(21) Ratings
Can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud.
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is IBM Cloudant?
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
IBM Cloudant Competitors
IBM Cloudant Technical Details
Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
Mobile Application | No |
Supported Languages | English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese/Brazil, Spanish, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(123)Attribute Ratings
- 7.3Likelihood to Renew1 rating
- 8.2Availability1 rating
- 8.2Performance1 rating
- 7.7Usability5 ratings
- 8.6Support Rating4 ratings
- 7.3Online Training2 ratings
- 8.2Implementation Rating4 ratings
- 8.5Configurability3 ratings
- 9.6Product Scalability23 ratings
- 9.1Vendor pre-sale1 rating
- 8.2IBM Cloudant Usability2 ratings
Reviews
(1-4 of 4)Scaling our data layer without headaches
- 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
- Performance
- 80%8.0
- Availability
- 90%9.0
- Concurrency
- 90%9.0
- Security
- 60%6.0
- Scalability
- 90%9.0
- Data model flexibility
- 100%10.0
- Deployment model flexibility
- 70%7.0
- Ability to quickly scale and launch a new tenant on the system
- Test the architecture on CouchDB helped us to address initial design flaws.
- The migration to Cloudant as such was very painless.
- We have migrate our replication system to Cloudant Android Sync for mobile devices.
- We have regular informal contact with the Cloudant leadership to discuss our use cases and implementation strategies.
- Operations
Skills required:
- JSON
- Javascript (views), we use nano for the Node.js parts of the application
- Map/reduce concepts
- Document design.
- Java (we use Ektorp for the Java parts of the application)
- Storing the business transactions performed offline
- Storing usage metrics
- Storing content configuration documents
- Reporting on all of the above.
- Distributed replications
- Waiting on some really cool use cases for DashDB.
- More reporting with DashDB.
- More ad-hoc reporting.
- Much more storage of data.
- Automatic archiving of the database (e.g. like Amazon Glacier) would be a killer feature.
- Product Features
- Prior Experience with the Product
- Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
- Online training
When you create a database, you can configure the number of internal shards.
Cloudant support can help with the advanced settings if needed.
- Avoid large documents (prefer a lot of small documents).
- Use UUID as _id whenever possible to avoid naming conflicts (especially in distributed environments where you don't control this).
- Learn to write efficient views (instead of search)
- Learn about handling the 429 error code!
- You don't need to have replication of the data on 8 nodes by default (check out the Q parameter)
- Editing the docs in the dashboard
- Writing ad-hoc queries
- Permissions management
- The Dashboard is slow and takes time to load many databases.
- Writing a new map/reduce view indexes the entire DB for every change. In Couchbase, you have a feature to create a view for a subset of the data, this is very convenient.
- Pure response time speed is actually something to be improved.
- The performance of the Dashboard (especially with a lot of databases) needs improvement.
There are a few cases where we noticed issues: some replication jobs were not properly triggered (this is a long standing issue that we are dealing with with the support team).
CSM have also been helpful at times.
- Implemented in-house
- Designing the documents to be scalable.
- (Manually) sharding of the document on many databases was a key design decision for us (we shard per "day"), so that we can more replicate back and forth.
- Designing performing views for large amounts of document (ad-hoc reporting) is very tricky.
Best for mobile
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 $50 allowance makes Cloudant the best way to start
- It would be nice to have a way to import bulk data
- There must be a better way to check usage. There are a lot of transactions not shown in the actual report
- There must be a way to reset a db -- a way to set the actual data as the base and eliminate all deleted docs
It is not so good for report apps or to handle too much structured data, because the Cloudant query can turn in something tricky, specially if your data model gets complicated.
- Positive: you can start your app at 0$ cost. After that, you can combine Cloud data with local Couchdb servers for heavy operations as export to RDBMS
- Negative: moving from lite to standard pricing plan requires to restart your app
- CouchDB and Couchbase Server
As for Couchbase, it has membase but the hosted options are much more expensive.
In the SQL world, I tried several sync solutions but the configuration and flow is not as smooth as the built-in capability in Cloudant.
Direct use is just for developers, who integrate their services in our applications that most of the time are combined with Couchdb/PouchDb on the edge in order to control the cloud usage and gain Offline first in our apps.
Indirect use, are all of our internal users because they use an app with cloudant services inside
NodeJS because they need to understand and modify the scripts to load info to Cloudant. And finally javascript just to maintain views
- Catalog server. All "combos" and list in apps are calling data from a Cloudant/PouchDb
- Data capture database. Apps for data input, use Cloudant/Pouchdb as the first storage server
- data segmentation. Some apps access only to the data they need
- Data Capture, because Cloudant write operations are faster. After that, we use the /changes feed to get the info back to our RDBMS
- As a Cache, kind of distributed redis service in order to free up resources in our main rdbms server
- we combine Cloudant and couchdb/pouchdb in order to minimize the use of cloud services, mainly for /changes feed access
- Cloudant partitioned will allow us to consolidate several Dbs in one
- search indexes is something we are evaluating
- Implemented in-house
phase 1: synchronization scripts, configuring how to transfer data to the client
phase 2: secondary indexes, setting new ways to query the data using map/reduce mechanism
phase 3: cloudant query, ease complicated queries using this kind of indexes
- Data rules must be well coordinated between several components to avoid data inconsistency
- Synchronization rules must be tested "out" because there is nothing like a sandbox
- Online training
- Self-taught
- replication
- data browsing
- query via http interfase
- security settings on database
- filtered replication rules
- data events rules
Cost and performance is in balance using Cloudant as a backend compared with other hosted solutions.
IBM Cloudant Experience
- 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
- savings in initial hardware cost as well cost of server build to be ready to load data base
- Cloudant was the first truly cloud based database solution implemented by in our organization and hence lots of effort went in to make it a success so that it can be a role model for cloud adoption in the organization
- as a noSQL data base for big data analytics
- As a caching solution
- as a graph data base
- integration with master data management solution (MDM) so that Cloudant can act as a cache for a faster response to multiple requests made to the data base at the same time
- fully leverage the graph database capability of Cloudant
- Ability to load data quickly
- It stores a very large amount of information very efficiently. Granted, we're just storing call detail records, but we're storing 200K records in 50MB.
- Querying isn't as fancy as SQL-based databases. But if you know what you need and can get it in a view, it is very fast. I'm querying both date and phone number without any issues.
- The UI for managing your databases is top notch. We can build views and searches, and query those with issues. This lets us refine and perfect our JS functions and queries very easily.
- Search Queries. They work when they work, but some of the documentation is a tad confusing and the bookmark system of pagination is not great.
- Call Detail Record Storage
- Billing Data Storage
- Faxing Data
- I use complex keys with Cloudant views to query not just CDRs by phone, but by date as well. Range queries on views are great!
- I would really like to integrate it with InfluxDB and some monitoring software to create a more performant and efficient monitoring platform. Many software out there like to use ElasticSearch, but ElasticSearch is very costly resource-wise.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- It does what it says on the box. Stores data, retrieves data, queries data with Map/Reduce and full text search.
- Full text search can be really tricky to get working correctly. It works, but then you find it's not quite querying the way you expect it.
- Implemented in-house
- Getting queries working correctly. I was new to how views worked so I went down the full text path only to find it didn't quite worked out how I thought. Then I realize that phone numbers are just long number and went that route with ranged keys on views.