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 If you have to manage a lot of different databases from different vendors, you could do well by standardizing on this product. It checks all the boxes for a proper database management studio. You would only have to learn one product to manage them all. However, if you are looking to find a good product for a single database vendor, you might be better off finding a tool that was designed specifically for that vendor product.
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 Foreign Key Constraint data viewer! This was a tremendously helpful feature that not many other products have. Just pick a constraint and see the data in the child tables! No setup required! Supports any and every database imaginable. 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 Somewhat laggy performance. Boot up speed was on the slow side and connecting to our database servers was also a little slower than other products. User interface can be a little clunky. Instead of the usual tree view of servers, databases, and schemas, you are presented with lists that you click on and get new windows to pick the new list of data from. Not organized efficiently. 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 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 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 Compared to Microsoft's SQL Management Studio, Valentina studio was comparable, just harder to get used to in the UI department. It ran slightly slower than other products but did save some time with neat features they baked into the product. However, in using DBeaver Community and DBForge Studio for PostgreSQL from Devart, we found different products that the team ultimately decided to use. DBeaver has all of the features we needed most (minus the constraint data viewer) and a more intuitive UI that we were used to. DBForge Studio for PostgreSQL has a very standard Windows look and feel and lacks some features, like database/table designers, but makes up for those shortcomings in the much easier filtering and sorting options right in the data grids. You can even write a query and edit the data returned, which is something we don't see in many of these tools. Our team ultimately settled on the developers using DBeaver and the support team that needs data viewing/editing capabilities using DBForge Studio.
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 It saved time in some areas of finding child data by not having to write queries to find it. The user interface caused some extra training for some users and ultimately caused them to not like using it. Read full review ScreenShots