IBM Cloud Databases vs. MySQL vs. Redis Software

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.

Incentivized

MySQL is best suited for applications on platform like high-traffic content-driven websites, small-scale web apps, data warehouses which regards light analytical workloads. However its less suited for areas like enterprise data warehouse, OLAP cubes, large-scale reporting, applications requiring flexible or semi-structured data like event logging systems, product configurations, dynamic forms.

Incentivized

Redis has been a great investment for our organization as we needed a solution for high speed data caching. The ramp up and integration was quite easy. Redis handles automatic failover internally, so no crashes provides high availability. On the fly scaling scale to more/less cores and memory as and when needed.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Stable - it just runs, with minimal downtime or errors
• Fast - well-structured data is quickly written and read
• Secure - MySQL is easy to keep data secure from people and applications that shouldn't see it
• Easy to use - SQL is industry standard so no problems with adding, editing and reading data stored in MySQL

Incentivized

• Easy for developers to understand. Unlike Riak, which I've used in the past, it's fast without having to worry about eventual consistency.
• Reliable. With a proper multi-node configuration, it can handle failover instantly.
• Configurable. We primarily still use Memcache for caching but one of the teams uses Redis for both long-term storage and temporary expiry keys without taking on another external dependency.
• Fast. We process tens of thousands of RPS and it doesn't skip a beat.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Learning curve: is big. Newbies will face problems in understanding the platform initially. However, with plenty of online resources, one can easily find solutions to problems and learn on the go.
• Backup and restore: MySQL is not very seamless. Although the data is never ruptured or missed, the process involved is not very much user-friendly. Maybe, a new command-line interface for only the backup-restore functionality shall be set up again to make this very important step much easier to perform and maintain.

Incentivized

• We had some difficulty scaling Redis without it becoming prohibitively expensive.
• Redis has very simple search capabilities, which means its not suitable for all use cases.
• Redis doesn't have good native support for storing data in object form and many libraries built over it return data as a string, meaning you need build your own serialization layer over it.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

For teaching Databases and SQL, I would definitely continue to use MySQL. It provides a good, solid foundation to learn about databases. Also to learn about the SQL language and how it works with the creation, insertion, deletion, updating, and manipulation of data, tables, and databases. This SQL language is a foundation and can be used to learn many other database related concepts.

Incentivized

We will definitely continue using Redis because: 1. It is free and open source. 2. We already use it in so many applications, it will be hard for us to let go. 3. There isn't another competitive product that we know of that gives a better performance. 4. We never had any major issues with Redis, so no point turning our backs.

Incentivized

IBM Cloud Databases' pricing structure is easy to understand, and if you choose the right product, you can operate your system at minimal cost. Although there is ample documentation available, there doesn't seem to be a user community running on it, so specific usage know-how and troubleshooting can sometimes take longer than expected.

I give MySQL a 9/10 overall because I really like it but I feel like there are a lot of tech people who would hate it if I gave it a 10/10. I've never had any problems with it or reached any of its limitations but I know a few people who have so I can't give it a 10/10 based on those complaints.

It is quite simple to set up for the purpose of managing user sessions in the backend. It can be easily integrated with other products or technologies, such as Spring in Java. If you need to actually display the data stored in Redis in your application this is a bit difficult to understand initially but is possible.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

We have never contacted MySQL enterprise support team for any issues related to MySQL. This is because we have been using primarily the MySQL Server community edition and have been using the MySQL support forums for any questions and practical guidance that we needed before and during the technical implementations. Overall, the support community has been very helpful and allowed us to make the most out of the community edition.

Incentivized

The support team has always been excellent in handling our mostly questions, rarely problems. They are responsive, find the solution and get us moving forward again. I have never had to escalate a case with them. They have always solved our problems in a very timely manner. I highly commend the support team.

Incentivized

1. Estimate your data size. 2. Test, test, and test.

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Whitelisting of the AWS lambda functions.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

MongoDB has a dynamic schema for how data is stored in 'documents' whereas MySQL is more structured with tables, columns, and rows. MongoDB was built for high availability whereas MySQL can be a challenge when it comes to replication of the data and making everything redundant in the event of a DR or outage.

Incentivized

We are big users of MySQL and PostgreSQL. We were looking at replacing our aging web page caching technology and found that we could do it in SQL, but there was a NoSQL movement happening at the time. We dabbled a bit in the NoSQL scene just to get an idea of what it was about and whether it was for us. We tried a bunch, but I can only seem to remember Mongo and Couch. Mongo had big issues early on that drove us to Redis and we couldn't quite figure out how to deploy couch.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• As it is an open source solution through community solution, we can use it in a multitude of projects without cost license
• The acquisition by Oracle makes you need to contract support for the enterprise version
• If you have knowledge about oracle databases, you can get more out of the enterprise version

Incentivized

• Redis has helped us increase our throughput and server data to a growing amount of traffic while keeping our app fast. We couldn't have grown without the ability to easily cache data that Redis provides.
• Redis has helped us decrease the load on our database. By being able to scale up and cache important data, we reduce the load on our database reducing costs and infra issues.
• Running a Redis node on something like AWS can be costly, but it is often a requirement for scaling a company. If you need data quickly and your business is already a positive ROI, Redis is worth the investment.

Incentivized