Amazon DynamoDB vs IBM Cloud Databases (formerly Compose)

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 Cloud Databases (formerly Compose)

I'd imagine there will be some limitations on in depth customization of elasticsearch- but we haven't run into them yet.It also might be a bit expensive for running at a large scale vs hosting your own cluster.

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Matt Dunbar

CTO

Integrations.ioInternet, 1-10 employees

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Feature Rating Comparison

Amazon DynamoDB

7.9

IBM Cloud Databases (formerly Compose)

—

Performance

8.0

—

Availability

8.4

—

Concurrency

9.0

—

Security

8.7

—

Scalability

9.7

—

Data model flexibility

4.0

—

Deployment model flexibility

7.3

—

Amazon DynamoDB

—

IBM Cloud Databases (formerly Compose)

8.3

Automatic software patching

—

8.5

Database scalability

—

8.6

Automated backups

—

8.6

Database security provisions

—

8.2

Monitoring and metrics

—

6.8

Automatic host deployment

—

8.8

Pros

No need to worry about hosting and ease of scaling and operations
Distributed and flexible as Amazon DynamoDB does not have a fixed schema
Based on load, options to increase throughput

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Entertainment Company, 11-50 employees

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Easy-to-use
Elasticsearch hosting

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Matt Dunbar

CTO

Integrations.ioInternet, 1-10 employees

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Cons

64KB limit on row size and 1MB limit on querying
Increasing throughput is expensive
Secondary indexes are not supported

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Entertainment Company, 11-50 employees

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Menu options in the platform could be consolidated better

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Yann Eves

Legal Services, 1-10 employees

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Likelihood to Renew

Amazon DynamoDB6.9

Based on 13 answers

We're stuck with it for now, but if we could do it again, we certainly would not choose DynamoDB again. There are too many other good options for NoSQL databases now, even within Amazon's "borders". However, for the moment, the application is reliable and useful, so it is accomplishing its objective, we just had high hopes that we could use it for many other customer facing features once the data had been stored – not really the case, or at least not affordably the case.

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Justin Schroeder

Full Stack Engineer

Braid, LLCMarketing and Advertising, 11-50 employees

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IBM Cloud Databases (formerly Compose)9.0

Based on 2 answers

I am very fond of the features and reliability of the compose DaaS, however I could switch if I find same qualities for lower price.

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Verified User

Executive in Research & Development

Automotive Company, 1-10 employees

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Usability

No score

No answers yet

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IBM Cloud Databases (formerly Compose)8.7

Based on 3 answers

It is great the only things I have stumbled upon is the non standard port 80 they use and sometimes expired SSL certificate.

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Verified User

Executive in Research & Development

Automotive Company, 1-10 employees

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Support

No score

No answers yet

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IBM Cloud Databases (formerly Compose)7.0

Based on 4 answers

Very slow response times and the responses have often not been satisfactory.

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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Information Technology and Services Company, 1-10 employees

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Alternatives Considered

Sql is much more feature rich yet costly and harder to maintain. Requires physical servers while dynamo everything is in the cloud across multiple AZs. Redis is actually great to put on top of dynamo to use as a read cache which is much faster and cheaper, but the storage and retrieval options are not as robust and the reliability is decreased

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Adam Lauer

Software Engineer

Earth NetworksEnvironmental Services, 51-200 employees

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Other options are lower priced, however IBM Compose has by far the best interface for managing and editing data within the database. It also has many forms of databases for us to deploy, beyond what we are currently using. So, in the event we need to add other services, we can trust IBM Compose to handle that data for us.

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Tyler Johnson

Senior Software Architect

Beneath The InkComputer Software, 1-10 employees

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Return on Investment

Better faster coding for data storage and retrieval
Can get very expensive very fast for some use cases, while really cheap for others
Hidden errors and short falls leads to very frustrating troubleshooting

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Adam Lauer

Software Engineer

Earth NetworksEnvironmental Services, 51-200 employees

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IBM Compose has remained viable for businesses I've worked with at a smaller scale, and has no problem scaling to higher demand
The only place I feel IBM Compose has held me back is in producing low latency solutions across all geography, its current AWS / IBM Cloud / Google Cloud data centres could be expanded upon

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Yann Eves

Legal Services, 1-10 employees

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