Does what it promises well, for instance, as a sidecar for the main enterprise data warehouse. However, I would not recommend using it as the main data warehouse, particularly due to the heavy business logic, as other dedicated tools are more suitable for ensuring scalable operations in terms of change management and multi-developer adjustments.
MonetDB is great when you are performing adhoc queries on a large set of data. For example, if you store data in a typical RDBMS such as MySQL or Postgres and want to join large tables for analytics but the query runs unacceptably slow then MonetDB can act as a second database to offload complex queries. Based on my experience, it may not be a production-ready database since there aren't many DBAs familiar with it and due to lack of documentation, maintenance can become a little tricky.
This is an open source software so there are obvious drawbacks, the biggest of which is a lack of documentation.
MonetDB does not seem to be well known outside of the academic environment so there is less information when you are searching for answers of any type.
I'd like to see more use cases and/or best practices so that commercial companies like ours can optimally use all of its highly performant features.
The code is written in C/C++ and this can be negative if you are a mainly java-shop and need UDF - User Defined Function.
As with other cloud tools, users must learn a new terminology to navigate the various tools and configurations, and understand Google Cloud's configuration structure to perform even the most basic operations. So the learning curve is quite steep, but after a few months, it gets easier to maintain.
GCP support in general requires a support agreement. For small organizations like us, this is not affordable or reasonable. It would help if Google had a support mechanism for smaller organizations. It was a steep learning curve for us because this was our first entry into the cloud database world. Better documentation also would have helped.
Unlike other products, Google Cloud SQL has very flexible features that allow it to be selected for a free trial account so that the product can be analyzed and tested before purchasing it. Integration capabilities with most of the web services tools are easier regarding Google Cloud SQL with its nature and support.
We have used Five9 in my previous company but on a much smaller scale. It was more expensive, however we were using it for a max of 50 employees, now we need a much bigger platform. We also used Five9 for other things, like phone dialers etc. so it was a little different.
With managed database system, it has given us near 100% data availability
It has also improved web layer experience with faster processing and authentication using database fields
Google Cloud SQL also gels up well with Google Analytics and other analytics systems for us to join up different data points and process them for deeper dives and analysis
If you are familiar with a general database concept and played with open source products before then MonetDB will give you immediate return in terms of productivity since developers can quickly develop and verify their test cases involving back-end database with a large sample data set.
There is a stiff learning curve due to lack of documentation and sparse information available on the internet.
Overall experience has been positive since MonetDB gives you another option when it comes to building out a data warehouse.
