Likelihood to Recommend Less Appropriate Scenario: 1) Small Scale or Low Budget Projects 2) Organizations with limited expertise in cloud technologies may find the learning curve steep, especially if they are not familiar with the IBM Cloud platform 3) If database requirements are highly dynamic and change frequently, the comprehensive features and management provided by IBM Cloud Databases might be overkill. A more flexible, self-managed solution could be preferable for adapting to rapid changes.
Read full review Applications where the users need [to] execute many short queries. With new storage engines such as Aria, which allows to replace MyISAM with some improvements, and XtraDB, which evolves InnoDB. To fuse the legacy features with the features available in NoSQL databases. Connection management, which allows multiplying the number of concurrent accesses. New clustering engines, such as Galera, which allow interesting possibilities for Cloud adoption. Read full review Pros The ease of setup was effortless. For anyone with development experience, a few simple questions such as name and login data will get you set up. The web application to manage cluster settings, billing settings and even introspect the data was simple and most importantly worked all the time. This can not always be said for web interfaces of other products. Read full review Simpler learning curve. MariaDB is a cleaner, simpler system that is (IMO) easier to learn and easier to manage effectively than many other database systems. Lower hardware requirements. After migrating to MariaDB from another database software system, we find that our hardware needs have substantially decreased. MariaDB support is very responsive. It's like they actually care. On the few occasions we've run into technical issues, support has always come through with what we needed. Once it was showing me a relatively new feature the server supported that I wasn't aware of, that, once I was able to properly make use of it helped me resolve a serious production performance issue. Architectural flexibility. As an example, the ready availability of synchronous (Galera) versus asynchronous replication schemes without being locked into one of the other by enormous technical complexity or punitive licensing, allows the customer to find what really works best for their needs. Read full review Cons Better cost reports, before just increasing to another tier, thus increasing the price. This is critical for early stage startups, where budget is tight. Add more data center options. As a comparison, a similar service, Aiven.io has dozen more options than Compose (basically all big cloud providers). We moved from AWS to Digital Ocean, which made us stop using Compose, since Compose forces us to be either on IBM or AWS. Read full review Driver Support - Some third party applications use database drivers that cause unexplained slowness with MariaDB. This can be worked around by using the MySQL drivers, but it's not clear what causes the problem in the first place. Support - While online communities are helpful in diagnosing problems, there isn't as much professional documentation/support available for MariaDB as some of the other major database options. Data Visualization - It would be helpful if there were more built in options for analyzing statistics and generating reports. Read full review Likelihood to Renew IBM is our trusted partner which never failed to meet our expectations. Stability, efficiency, usability and security is a must have for our business which is fully provided by IBM Cloud Databases
Read full review Usability It is great the only things I have stumbled upon is the non standard port 80 they use and sometimes expired SSL certificate.
Read full review MariaDB is very usable and stable to be used in production settings as an alternative to
MySQL . The shortcomings of SQL are present but well understood in the community, and if the decision were to be made again, I would choose MariaDB over
MySQL on future projects.
Read full review Support Rating Support is helpful enough, but we haven't always had questions answered in a satisfactory manner. At one time we realized that Compose had stopped taking database snapshots on its two-per-day schedule, and had in fact not taken one for many days. Support recognized the problem and it was fixed, but the lack of proactive checks and the inability to share exactly what happened has caused us to look elsewhere for production work loads
Read full review We have launched several inquiries to MariaDB support and they have always responded very quickly and have not been tutoring for the duration of the incident/problem.
Likewise, they want to hold constant meetings with the client to get their opinion as well as how they can help.
I see a very human support and concerned about the customer.
Read full review Alternatives Considered The reason why I choose IBM Cloud Databases is that the IBM cloud toolset is already being used in other functions of the company and by using IBM Cloud Databases, the other cloud tools are better embedded and integrated. If the company is set to use amazon tools, I would go for rds.
Read full review MariaDB stacks up the the competition just fine. Due to is ture open source nature we do not have to worry about licencing and spending money on nothing. Moreover, MariaDB does everything that we need to get done. We can run data that is a million rows or many smaller projects on the same environment with little overhead. One of the best features that MariaDB has is the ability of backup or dump data to standard text sql statements. That was one of the reasons why we choose MariaDb because it makes backups or transferring data a snap
Read full review Return on Investment Prove use cases prior to administering entire platform, obtain ROI faster Able to achieve the technological components of our advanced analytics team without full scale purchase of AI platform Developed several studies to prove out cloud Db value, speed to deploy Read full review Low CAPEX if you have a team that use open source software day by day Medium OPEX if you have a team that use open source software day by day Perfect to use in academic ambient to support researchers and students Read full review ScreenShots