Amazon DynamoDB vs IBM Cloudant

Amazon DynamoDB

DynamoDB is well suited when you have small development team and want ease of scaling and operations. Since it is hosted by Amazon, it provides a fully managed service. It provides great read and write for simple queries. When you have complex queries, I think this is not well suited. We need to remember this is not suited for a relational database.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Entertainment Company, 11-50 employees

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IBM Cloudant

The solution to store claims information worked for us, but the enterprise NoSQL market has expanded so much that we might not [have] used Cloudant had an alternative been available. Make sure you ask about ACID compliance and about what the difference between NoSQL and SQL databases are to that the IT managers understand why they are buying and how that differs from data solutions they've bought in the past.

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Verified User

Analyst in Marketing

Retail Company, 51-200 employees

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Feature Rating Comparison

Amazon DynamoDB

7.9

IBM Cloudant

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Performance

8.0

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Availability

8.4

—

Concurrency

9.0

—

Security

8.7

—

Scalability

9.7

—

Data model flexibility

4.0

—

Deployment model flexibility

7.3

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Pros

Fast retrieval
Auto scaling to control costs
Query and scanning allow for different use cases

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Adam Lauer

Software Engineer

Earth NetworksEnvironmental Services, 51-200 employees

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Managing different documents in JSON format: every well formed structure of JSON docs are stored without a previous data schema support.
Queu reviews: are the power map-reduce functions applying after the documents ingestion.
Replication: powerful and easy DevOps function to save, copy or back up the data from one Cloudant DB to another in synchronizing way even between different sites geographically distributed.
The automatic creation of Data Warehouse relational DB DashDB for Analytics from NoSQL is one of the [most] invaluable features ever found. The SDP-Schema Discovery Process is really unleashing the power of JSON schema-less into structured relational DB ready for all analytic tools without any programming intervention.
The API GEO call based on GeoJSON structure, is one of the features that has been much more awaited in the "location awareness" application now implicit in quite all applications from marketing to logistics. The GEO API is built by the query options making the geo search application integration more easy than ever.

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Romualdo Gobbo

Owner

NEWLOG Consulting SrlComputer Software, 11-50 employees

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Cons

Query "language" leaves much to be desired. If you're coming from a database like MongoDB or SQL you'll find it extremely difficult to get data back out of the system without breaking the bank.
Because querying is poor, often the only way to get data out of arbitrary fields is by scanning the records – but the pricing model for this is cost prohibitive. This means you frequently need additional architecture to keep track of where data is stored in the hash table. While this is an issue for lots of NoSQL database, DynamoDB is probably the worst offender I've used to date because of the pricing model.
Amazon does offer a local version of DynamoDB you can run in development, but its an extremely clunky and very hard to integrate into any kind of continuous integration.

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Justin Schroeder

Full Stack Engineer

Braid, LLCMarketing and Advertising, 11-50 employees

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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.

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Verified User

Consultant in Information Technology

Computer Software Company, 10,001+ employees

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Likelihood to Renew

Amazon DynamoDB7.1

Based on 13 answers

I wouldn't stay with the product, but may simply because I have no other choice. The reason for keeping it will depend on if we are given time by management to go to another solution (back to an SQL database) or the purchase of an ETL tool.

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Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

Computer Software Company, 11-50 employees

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No score

No answers yet

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Usability

No score

No answers yet

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IBM Cloudant7.7

Based on 5 answers

cloudant adds some features to improve security and data query like tokens and cloudant query that really adds a lot of power to these features over the standard CouchDB. also you can integrate your data into a relational schema using ibm dashdb for data analysis. everything is in the right place

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victor pease solano

General Manager

SupermioComputer Software, 1-10 employees

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Support

No score

No answers yet

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IBM Cloudant7.8

Based on 3 answers

Quick response times, knowledgable and helpful support staff.

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Kris Bandurski

Executive Vice President, Engineering

Green Man GamingRetail, 51-200 employees

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Implementation

No score

No answers yet

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IBM Cloudant8.8

Based on 4 answers

Views and Keys can do a lot if you're clever about what information you need to check.

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Bryan Redeagle

Developer

Qubit NetworksTelecommunications, 11-50 employees

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Alternatives Considered

When compared to SQL and many other No SQL databases out in the market, I guess DynamoDB is a perfect stack for developing quick websites. More than that it's highly scalable which is offered by DynamoDB

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Verified User

Employee in Engineering

Higher Education Company, 5001-10,000 employees

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In our case it was a no-brainer since we were using IBM Cloud. In comparison to DB2 the ease of use and JSON support was the key.

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Deepak Kaul

CTO

CogAbilityInformation Technology and Services, 1-10 employees

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Scalability

No score

No answers yet

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IBM Cloudant8.6

Based on 21 answers

We had our cluster scaled out for a promotion that involved a huge increase in write requests. The important thing there is that by scaling out, i.e., having additional nodes spun up, we increased the cluster's processing power and ingest capacity without any downtime.

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Kris Bandurski

Executive Vice President, Engineering

Green Man GamingRetail, 51-200 employees

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Return on Investment

Scalability out of the box
No server maintenance
Infrastructure comes for "free"

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Richard Rout

Software Developer

FACT0RYComputer Software, 11-50 employees

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Time and savings with ease of operation
Good developer support, the support documentation is very well laid out.

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Deepak Kaul

CTO

CogAbilityInformation Technology and Services, 1-10 employees

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Pricing Details

Amazon DynamoDB

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Additional Pricing Details

—

More Information

Amazon DynamoDB More Information

IBM Cloudant

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Additional Pricing Details

There is never a charge for the first $50 of usage each month. After that, data volume is charged at $1 per GB/month, "heavy" API requests (PUTs, POSTs, DELETEs) are charged at $0.015 per 100 each month, and "light" API requests (GETs, HEADs) are charged at $0.015 per 500 each month. API requests that read or write multiple JSON docs in bulk count as 1 API request.