Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Riak is well suited to applications such as:
Transaction logging e.g. financial transactions and/or exchange rates.
Storing time series data, especially IoT.
Storing massive amounts of data e.g. corporation wide backups, data lakes etc.
A fully s3 compatible replacement for
Amazon S3 ensuring data privacy.
Riak is not as well suited to:
Traditional RDBMS functions, especially those that join the outputs of one or more queries together to produce the desired result.
Read full review Pros 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!! Read full review Highly available: If nodes go offline for any reason, the system still operates. Highly scalable: There is a minimum of 5 nodes, which can handle a lot by themselves. When scaling is required, it can be done easily, with minimal to no downtime on large scales. Very fast searching: Riak has SOLR indexing built-into the core product, which makes querying for data very fast. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Deletes!!! We've seen on numerous occasions where Riak has "resurrected" deleted data. We've worked with Basho numerous times and tried multiple changes to the way we interact with Riak to prevent the problem but it still remains. The deletes seem to reappear weeks, even months, after the delete was issued. We've had to work around this issue by providing a "deleted" flag for all data objects stored in Riak. Thus, we do no delete but simply flip the flag. Excess baggage we would really like to not have to worry about. Search. Currently there's no way to tell what data you have in Riak without already knowing a particular bucket/key. There is a way to list the keys for a given bucket but due to performance implications, this is not a viable method to lookup data. Especially when you have a large amount of keys in the bucket. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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
Read full review Right now, I'm on a project where we need databases that can run on embedded systems. Riak isn't necessarily the best fit for that scenario. But when we need a clustered database, that's where we'd start considering Riak.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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.
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Support Rating Very happy by the commitment given by the team which has been really good over the last 7 years of usage.
Read full review Despite Basho going bankrupt and the project becoming fully open-source, community support is reasonably good, albeit a little slow at times. Paid enterprise-grade support is also available from former Basho engineers but the same company also contributes to the community support for free for basic questions or specific knowledge areas.
Read full review Online Training 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
Read full review Implementation Rating 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. Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Because of the RESTful HTTP interface, the consistency model, and because of the catalog-driven data model, Riak was an easy win over
Redis and Memcached.
Read full review Scalability 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.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Riak has been a key part of our company's build process for our client's search backend. It is valuable for is in that it provides a reliable way to view the current search index. Read full review ScreenShots