IBM Cloudant vs. Apache Derby vs. etcd

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

If you need a SQL-capable database-like solution that is file-based and embeddable in your existing Java Virtual Machine processes, Apache Derby is an open-source, zero cost, robust and performant option. You can use it to store structured relational data but in small files that can be deployed right alongside with your solution, such as storing a set of relational master data or configuration settings inside your binary package that is deployed/installed on servers or client machines.

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

• Apache Derby is SMALL. Compared to an enterprise scale system such as MSSQL, it's footprint is very tiny, and it works well as a local database.
• The SPEED. I have found that Apache Derby is very fast, given the environment I was developing in.
• Based in JAVA (I know that's an obvious thing to say), but Java allows you to write some elegant Object Oriented structures, thus allowing for fast, Agile test cases against the database.
• Derby is EASY to implement and can be accessed from a console with little difficulty. Making it appropriate for everything from small embedded systems (i.e. just a bash shell and a little bit of supporting libraries) to massive workstations.

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

• It may not scale as well as some more mature database products.
• Used it primarily from the command line with openjpa and jdbc, and from third-party clients such as Squirrel.
• May benefit by providing more sophisticated tools to optimize query performance.

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

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

• 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

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

SQLite is another open-source zero-cost file-based SQL-capable database solution and is a good alternative to Apache Derby, especially for non-Java-based solutions. We chose Apache Derby as it is Java-based, and so is the solution we embedded it in. However, SQLite has a similar feature set and is widely used in the industry to serve the same purposes for native solutions such as C or C++-based products.

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

• 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.

• Being Open source, the resources spent on the purchase of the product are ZERO.
• Contrary to popular belief, open source software CAN provide support, provided that the developers/contributors are willing to answer your emails.
• Overall, the ROI was positive: being able to experiment with an open source technology that could perform on par with the corporate products was promising, and gave us much information about how to proceed in the future.

Incentivized