Apache CouchDB vs. IBM Cloudant

Great for REST API development, if you want a small, fast server that will send and receive JSON structures, CouchDB is hard to beat. Not great for enterprise-level relational database querying (no kidding). While by definition, document-oriented databases are not relational, porting or migrating from relational, and using CouchDB as a backend is probably not a wise move as it's reliable, but It may not always be highly available.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• It can replicate and sync with web browsers via PouchDB. This lets you keep a synced copy of your database on the client-side, which offers much faster data access than continuous HTTP requests would allow, and enables offline usage.
• Simple Map/Reduce support. The M/R system lets you process terabytes of documents in parallel, save the results, and only need to reprocess documents that have changed on subsequent updates. While not as powerful as Hadoop, it is an easy to use query system that's hard to screw up.
• Sharding and Clustering support. As of CouchDB 2.0, it supports clustering and sharding of documents between instances without needing a load balancer to determine where requests should go.
• Master to Master replication lets you clone, continuously backup, and listen for changes through the replication protocol, even over unreliable WAN links.

Incentivized

• 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.
• Support for Java for CouchDB app server analytics enables a greater control for over developers.
• Schema free oriented very easy to program and build applications on it.
• We love it!!

Incentivized

• NoSQL DB can become a challenge for seasoned RDBMS users.
• The map-reduce paradigm can be very demanding for first-time users.
• JSON format documents with Key-Value pairs are somewhat verbose and consume more storage.

Incentivized

• It was only after we went with the cloud-based solution that IBM rolled out an on-premise version.
• We found that a 3rd-party ODBC driver was required for a few applications that needed to pull data out of Cloudant.
• The sales process was difficult because the salesperson we used was not as versed on Cloudant as I had hoped.

Incentivized

Because our current solution S3 is working great and CouchDB was a nightmare. The worst is that at first, it seemed fine until we filled it with tons of data and then started to create views and actually delete.

Incentivized

the flexibility of NoSQL allow us to modify and upgrade our apps very fast and in a convenient way. Having the solution hosted by IBM is also giving us the chance to focus on features and the improvement of our apps. It's one thing less to be worried about

Incentivized

Couchdb is very simple to use and the features are also reduced but well implemented. In order to use it the way its designed, the ui is adequate and easy. Of course, there are some other task that can't be performed through the admin ui but the minimalistic design allows you to use external libraries to develop custom scripts

Incentivized

It's mostly just a straight forward API to a data store. I knock one off for the full text search thing, but I don't need it much anyways. Also, the dashboard UI they give is pretty nice to use. It provides syntax-highlighting for writing views and queries are easy to test. I wish other DBs had a UI like this.

Incentivized

it is a highly available solution in the IBM cloud portfolio and hence we have never had any issues with the data base being available - we also do continuous replication to be on the safer side just in case some thing goes awry. We also perform twice a year disaster recovery tests.

Incentivized

very easy to get started and is very developer friendly given that it uses couchDB analytics. It is a cloud based solution and hence there is no hardware investment in a server and staging the server to get started and the associated delays/bureaucracy involved to get started. Good documentation is also available.

Incentivized

Very happy by the commitment given by the team which has been really good over the last 7 years of usage.

Incentivized

online resources are good enough to understand but there is nothing like testing. In our case, we discovered some not documented behavior that we take in count now. Also, the experience in NodeJs is critical. Also, take in count that most of the "good practices" with cloudant are not in online courses but in blogs and pages from independent developers

Incentivized

it support is minimal also hw requirements. Also for development, we can have databases replicated everywhere and the replication is automagical. once you set up the security and the rules for replication, you are ready to go. The absence of a model let you build your app the way you want it

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

It has been 5+ years since we chose CouchDB. We looked an MongoDB, Cassandra, and probably some others. At the end of the day, the performance, power potential, and simplicity of CouchDB made it a simple choice for our needs. No one should use just because we did. As I said early, make sure you understand your problems, and find the right solution. Some random reading that might be useful: http://www.julianbrowne.com/article/viewer/brewers-cap-theorem https://www.couchbase.com/nosql-resources/why-nosql\ https://www.infoq.com/articles/cap-twelve-years-later-how-the-rules-have-changed

Incentivized

The feature-set, including security, is very comparable. Overall, IBM's services added to the product are mature and stable, although product support and engineers could be a little better. Global availability is improving, and Disaster Recover Capabilities are great. Overall, it's very comparable to MongoDB as a DBaaS offer, available globally and with great documentation.

Incentivized

The service scales incredibly well. As you would expect from CloudDB and IBM combination. The only reason I wouldn't score it a 10 is the fact that document trees can get nested and nested very quickly if you are attempting to do very complex datasets. Which makes your code that much more complex to deal. Its very possible we could find a solution to this problem with better database planning to begin with, but one of the reasons we chose a service over a self-hosted solution was so we could set it up quick and forget about it. So we weren't going to dedicate a team to architecture optimization.

Incentivized

• It has saved us hours and hours of coding.
• It is has taught us a new way to look at things.
• It has taught us patience as the first few weeks with CouchDB were not pleasant. It was not easy to pick up like MongoDB.

Incentivized

• IBM Cloudant is very secure and we never have to worry about losing data/unauthorized access
• It is one of the best data backup system and works well
• Global availability means it is easy to connect to the nearest data center and this reduces load time which is great.