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 Your upcoming app can be built faster on a fully managed SQL database and can be moved into Azure with a few to no application code changes. Flexible and responsive server less computing and Hyperscale storage can cope with your changing requirements and one of the main benefits is the reduction in costs, which is noticeable.
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 Maintenance is always an issue, so using a cloud solution saves a lot of trouble. On premise solutions always suffer from fragmented implementations here and there, where several "dba's" keep track of security and maintenance. With a cloud database it's much easier to keep a central overview. Security options in SQL database are next level... data masking, hiding sensitive data where always neglected on premise, whereas you'll get this automatically in the cloud. 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 One needs to be aware that some T-SQL features are simply not available. The programmatic access to server, trace flags, hardware from within Azure SQL Database is taken away (for a good reason). No SQL Agent so your jobs need to be orchestrated differently. The maximum concurrent logins maybe an unexpected problem. Sudden disconnects. The developers and admin must study the capacity and tier usage limits https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-subscription-service-limits otherwise some errors or even transaction aborts never seen before can occur. Only one Latin Collation choice. There is no way to debug T-SQL ( a big drawback in my point of view). 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 This is best solution as a DBA one could expect from a service provider and as a cloud service, it removes all your hassles.
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 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 give the support a high rating simply because every time we've had issues or questions, representatives were in contact with us quickly. Without fail, our issues/questions were handled in a timely matter. That kind of response is integral when client data integrity and availability is in question. There is also a wealth of documentation for resolving issues on your own.
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 We moved away from Oracle and NoSQL because we had been so reliant on them for the last 25 years, the pricing was too much and we were looking for a way to cut the cord.
Snowflake is just too up in the air, feels like it is soon to be just another line item to add to your Azure subscription. Azure was just priced right, easy to migrate to and plenty of resources to hire to support/maintain it. Very easy to learn, too.
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 Perfect for small and medium databases, being very cost effective. As a Platform as a Service, there is no concern about patches, upgrades and end of life. Be aware of security and network capabilities. The service cannot run in the VNET as Azure Virtual Machines do. Read full review ScreenShots