Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review We use Astra DB to improve our management systems. Storing data has become hassle-free and quite simple. When launching a Cassandra-based cloud application, Astra DB is exactly what you need. In addition to the standard training programs and videos, the extended support and training require significant additional effort to activate and cover which I feel is a bit more tedious task.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review It's very resilient and scalable, no downtime and no issues scaling up to meet our needs. Low latency reads and writes Cost effective - The on demand model worked out cheaper than running our own clusters Great support for any of our questions or issues Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Need better fine-grained Security options. The support team sometimes requires the escalate button pressed on tickets, to get timely responses. I will say, once the ticket is escalated, action is taken. They require better documentation on the migration of data. The three primary methods for migrating large data volumes are bulk, Cassandra Data Migrator, and ZDM (Zero Downtime Migration Utility). Over time I have become very familiar will all three of these methods; however, through working with the Services team and the support team, it seemed like we were breaking new ground. I feel if the utilities were better documented and included some examples and/or use cases from large data migrations; this process would have been easier. One lesson learned is you likely need to migrate your application servers to the same cloud provider you host Astra on; otherwise, the latency is too large for latency-sensitive applications. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Usability 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
Read full review It's a great product but suffers with counters. This isn't a deal breaker but lets down what is otherwise a good all round solution
Read full review Support Rating Their response time is fast, in case you do not contact them during business hours, they give a very good follow-up to your case. They also facilitate video calls if necessary for debugging.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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
Read full review Alternatives Considered Read full review We know Astra is built on Cassandra / Kubernetes / Stargate and can work on any cloud. The competitors we reviewed are cloud specific and create a lock in. We also have the option to run Cassandra / Stargate ourselves if we wanted to. The competitors don’t give that option
Read full review Scalability Our use case and requirements for scaling don't allow me to comment on ability to scale to millions of users, however from what I know of other use cases where Astra has been applied, and Astra's architectural design makes me confident it will be able to scale to meet most requirements
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review The high availability capabilities of Astra DB can assist in reducing downtime, which is crucial for revenue-generating applications. The developer-friendly features of Astra DB, as well as support for known query languages, can help expedite development, save development time, and minimize labor costs. This can result in a shorter time to market and a higher ROI. Read full review ScreenShots