Apache Spark vs. IBM Cloudant

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Apache Spark
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
N/AN/A
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
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 applications. Cloudant scales your database on the CouchDB framework and provides hosting, administrative tools, analytics and commercial support for CouchDB and BigCouch. Cloudant is often…
$1
per month per GB of storage above the included 20 GB
Pricing
Apache SparkIBM Cloudant
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Standard
$1
per month per GB of storage above the included 20 GB
Standard
$75
per month 100 reads/second ; 50 writes/second ; 5 global queries/second
Lite
Free
20 reads/second ; 10 writes/second ; 5 global queries / second ; 1 GB of storage capacity
Standard
Included
per month 20 GB of storage
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Apache SparkIBM Cloudant
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Features
Apache SparkIBM Cloudant
NoSQL Databases
Comparison of NoSQL Databases features of Product A and Product B
Apache Spark
-
Ratings
IBM Cloudant
9.4
21 Ratings
7% above category average
Performance00 Ratings9.821 Ratings
Availability00 Ratings8.121 Ratings
Concurrency00 Ratings9.921 Ratings
Security00 Ratings9.821 Ratings
Scalability00 Ratings9.121 Ratings
Data model flexibility00 Ratings9.921 Ratings
Deployment model flexibility00 Ratings9.121 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Apache SparkIBM Cloudant
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

Redis™*
Redis™*
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Cloudera Manager
Cloudera Manager
Score 9.7 out of 10
Redis™*
Redis™*
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Analytics Engine
IBM Analytics Engine
Score 8.8 out of 10
Redis™*
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Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Apache SparkIBM Cloudant
Likelihood to Recommend
9.9
(24 ratings)
8.1
(45 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(1 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(3 ratings)
7.7
(5 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
8.7
(4 ratings)
8.6
(4 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(4 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
8.5
(3 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.6
(23 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Apache SparkIBM Cloudant
Likelihood to Recommend
Apache
Well suited: To most of the local run of datasets and non-prod systems - scalability is not a problem at all. Including data from multiple types of data sources is an added advantage. MLlib is a decently nice built-in library that can be used for most of the ML tasks. Less appropriate: We had to work on a RecSys where the music dataset that we used was around 300+Gb in size. We faced memory-based issues. Few times we also got memory errors. Also the MLlib library does not have support for advanced analytics and deep-learning frameworks support. Understanding the internals of the working of Apache Spark for beginners is highly not possible.
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IBM
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.
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Pros
Apache
  • Apache Spark makes processing very large data sets possible. It handles these data sets in a fairly quick manner.
  • Apache Spark does a fairly good job implementing machine learning models for larger data sets.
  • Apache Spark seems to be a rapidly advancing software, with the new features making the software ever more straight-forward to use.
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IBM
  • 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!!
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Cons
Apache
  • Memory management. Very weak on that.
  • PySpark not as robust as scala with spark.
  • spark master HA is needed. Not as HA as it should be.
  • Locality should not be a necessity, but does help improvement. But would prefer no locality
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IBM
  • 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.
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Likelihood to Renew
Apache
Capacity of computing data in cluster and fast speed.
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IBM
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
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Usability
Apache
The only thing I dislike about spark's usability is the learning curve, there are many actions and transformations, however, its wide-range of uses for ETL processing, facility to integrate and it's multi-language support make this library a powerhouse for your data science solutions. It has especially aided us with its lightning-fast processing times.
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IBM
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.
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Reliability and Availability
Apache
No answers on this topic
IBM
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.
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Performance
Apache
No answers on this topic
IBM
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.
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Support Rating
Apache
1. It integrates very well with scala or python. 2. It's very easy to understand SQL interoperability. 3. Apache is way faster than the other competitive technologies. 4. The support from the Apache community is very huge for Spark. 5. Execution times are faster as compared to others. 6. There are a large number of forums available for Apache Spark. 7. The code availability for Apache Spark is simpler and easy to gain access to. 8. Many organizations use Apache Spark, so many solutions are available for existing applications.
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IBM
Very happy by the commitment given by the team which has been really good over the last 7 years of usage.
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Online Training
Apache
No answers on this topic
IBM
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
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Implementation Rating
Apache
No answers on this topic
IBM
  • 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.
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Alternatives Considered
Apache
All the above systems work quite well on big data transformations whereas Spark really shines with its bigger API support and its ability to read from and write to multiple data sources. Using Spark one can easily switch between declarative versus imperative versus functional type programming easily based on the situation. Also it doesn't need special data ingestion or indexing pre-processing like Presto. Combining it with Jupyter Notebooks (https://github.com/jupyter-incubator/sparkmagic), one can develop the Spark code in an interactive manner in Scala or Python
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IBM
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.
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Scalability
Apache
No answers on this topic
IBM
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.
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Return on Investment
Apache
  • Faster turn around on feature development, we have seen a noticeable improvement in our agile development since using Spark.
  • Easy adoption, having multiple departments use the same underlying technology even if the use cases are very different allows for more commonality amongst applications which definitely makes the operations team happy.
  • Performance, we have been able to make some applications run over 20x faster since switching to Spark. This has saved us time, headaches, and operating costs.
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IBM
  • 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.
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ScreenShots