IBM Cloudant - Great for your organization!
I have primarily used [IBM] Cloudant to facilitate academic and non-profit research.
Starting at $1 per month per GB of storage above the included 20 GB
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What is IBM Cloudant?
Cloudant is an open source non-relational, distributed database service that requires zero-configuration. It's based on the Apache-backed CouchDB project and the creator of the open source BigCouch project. Cloudant's service provides integrated data management, search, and analytics engine designed for web…
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Popular Features
- Concurrency (21)9.999%
- Performance (21)9.898%
- Security (21)9.898%
- Availability (21)8.181%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
Standard
$1
Cloud
per month per GB of storage above the included 20 GB
Standard
$75
Cloud
per month 100 reads/second ; 50 writes/second ; 5 global queries/second
Lite
Free
Cloud
20 reads/second ; 10 writes/second ; 5 global queries / second ; 1 GB of storage capacity
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.ibm.com/cloud/cloudant/pric…
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- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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What is IBM Cloudant?
IBM Cloudant is a distributed database that is optimized for handling heavy workloads that are typical of large, fast-growing web and mobile apps. Available as an SLA-backed, fully managed IBM Cloud service, Cloudant elastically scales throughput and storage independently. Cloudant is also available as a downloadable on-premises installation, and its API and replication protocol are compatible with an open source ecosystem that includes CouchDB, PouchDB and libraries for the most popular web and mobile development stacks.
IBM Cloudant Features
NoSQL Databases Features
- Supported: Performance
- Supported: Availability
- Supported: Concurrency
- Supported: Security
- Supported: Scalability
- Supported: Data model flexibility
- Supported: Deployment model flexibility
IBM Cloudant Video
database management with Cloudant
IBM Cloudant Competitors
IBM Cloudant Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
| Supported Languages | English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese/Brazil, Spanish, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional |
Frequently Asked Questions
Cloudant is an open source non-relational, distributed database service that requires zero-configuration. It's based on the Apache-backed CouchDB project and the creator of the open source BigCouch project.
Cloudant's service provides integrated data management, search, and analytics engine designed for web applications. Cloudant scales your database on the CouchDB framework and provides hosting, administrative tools, analytics and commercial support for CouchDB and BigCouch.
Cloudant is often considered part of a new generation of 'NoSQL' databases that don't require fixed table schemas and is challenging the dominance of traditional relational databases (including the popular MySQL).
Reviewers rate Concurrency and Data model flexibility highest, with a score of 9.9.
The most common users of IBM Cloudant are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Reviews
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February 14, 2019
Cloudant Rocks!
We are a cloud based solution provider and our products are deployed on the IBM cloud and we used IBM Cloudant as a database (persistent) storage. We use it across the board to store anything that needs persistent storage, from text to images and document attachments as well.
- Strong query interface, IBM Cloudant provides a very robust and flexible query interface allowing us to write simple as well as complex queries.
- Performance, for the most part we have been happy with the performance of the Cloudant database
- Simple and straight forward. Ability to roll out the instances quickly and with a simple interface has been important for us.
- The shared instances of Cloudant can have better isolation mechanisms. We have had instances where the performance of our instance was negatively impacted because other instances on the same node were taking more resources.
- Better conflict resolution. Cloudant should take away some complexity of conflict resolution from the application. Today the application has to manage most of that complexity.
February 14, 2019
Feels like floating on a Cloud
Cloudant DB is utilized in our organization in cooperation with IBM IOT platform to monitor supply chain for our disaster relief solution. Cloudant is also used to collect user reports and is used as a data dump for Watson learning to use for improving and also used for analytics.
- It’s fast to setup and go
- Good support for NodeJS
- Integrates super easy with microservices
- Documentation
- Support for SQL
February 14, 2019
IBM Cloudant DB - Scalability and Performance re-defined
IBM Cloudant DB is currently being used at 2 of our customers' places. The implementation is more confined to a couple of departments / function areas of the organization, but surely they are looking to adopt it on a bigger scale. The DB hosts not only their custom-built vendor onboarding applications, but also supports a portion of their intranet portal to manage a lot of employee related non-HR information like events, knowledge bases, quizzes application etc. They are looking to migrate data and applications from other databases to IBM Cloudant DB.
- For us, performance and scalability is the key, and Cloudant DB backed by CouchDB is scalable and performant.
- IBM Cloudant dB is very easy to provision for sandbox, development, QA as well as production.
- Support for Java for CouchDB app server analytics enables a greater control for over developers.
- Schema free oriented very easy to program and build applications on it.
- We love it!!
- Lacks in-memory capabilities
- Limited support for programming languages like Python, R, Perl
- No XML support
- No SQL support :(
March 30, 2018
IBM Cloudant, Great Managed NoSQL at Significant Cost
My organization had a need to store a moderate amount data for an insurance client. Our data storage solution needed to be flexible enough to support our BI solution as well as any in-house web apps the client might develop to their claims department. It also needed to be limited in the additional DBA overhead required to operate it. That is why my organization chose IBM Cloudant because it was able to meet the BI need, the needs of the web stack developers, and the DBA were kept happy too.
- We had a small data mart project that required the storage of some rather highly connected data that also had a relatively small footprint. This made IBM Cloudant an obvious choice because we could store the data in a data structure that met our project need al while using a platform that our web development team understood and was comfortable with.
- We had a bunch of geospatial data that we needed for analysis. Having GeoJSON being natively supported by Cloudant made it an easy choice.
- Cloudant was cloud-based and didn't require a DBA support it, this allowed the project to move ahead without pushback from the infrastructure team.
- It was only after we went with the cloud-based solution that IBM rolled out an on-premise version.
- We found that a 3rd-party ODBC driver was required for a few applications that needed to pull data out of Cloudant.
- The sales process was difficult because the salesperson we used was not as versed on Cloudant as I had hoped.
September 09, 2016
Cloudant is a great choice for DBaaS for mobile apps on multiple platforms and devices...
We use Cloudant as our online cloud database solution for our mobile health app. Our solution had to work cross platform with Android and iOS and allow syncing to local databases for offline use. Cloudant allowed for easy integration into our stack with very little setup. By not having to worry about converting between database architectures we were able to focus our development time on building features into our app.
- Easy Setup
- Simple API's
- Great Documentation
- Open Standards / Works with CouchDB and mobile PouchDB
- Built in live listeners to watch for data changes would be a nice addition
Cloudant NoSQL DB based on JSON is the foundation of our SaaS software solutions proposed in SaaS when the aim is document centric. Our last implementation was the Tracking & Tracing service offered in SaaS via IBM Bluemix, where all actors authorized can post their JSON docs in a very easy way without the constraint of one specific schema, and can retrieve or update the documents with RESTFul APIs that trace the "status" of each document.
Cloudant's flexibility helps in adding the data "views" even after the document creation, and this opens a new way to design documents, freeing them from relational constraints.
The replication function allows you to have in real time the same copy of docs updated in other Cloudant databases - even geographically distributed. Some interesting embedded features such as the Geo Query, based on the standard Geo-JSON specification, open the way to the development of location awareness solutions without the hassles to manage the geometry of the geo-map searching.
Cloudant's flexibility helps in adding the data "views" even after the document creation, and this opens a new way to design documents, freeing them from relational constraints.
The replication function allows you to have in real time the same copy of docs updated in other Cloudant databases - even geographically distributed. Some interesting embedded features such as the Geo Query, based on the standard Geo-JSON specification, open the way to the development of location awareness solutions without the hassles to manage the geometry of the geo-map searching.
- Managing different documents in JSON format: every well formed structure of JSON docs are stored without a previous data schema support.
- Queu reviews: are the power map-reduce functions applying after the documents ingestion.
- Replication: powerful and easy DevOps function to save, copy or back up the data from one Cloudant DB to another in synchronizing way even between different sites geographically distributed.
- The automatic creation of Data Warehouse relational DB DashDB for Analytics from NoSQL is one of the [most] invaluable features ever found. The SDP-Schema Discovery Process is really unleashing the power of JSON schema-less into structured relational DB ready for all analytic tools without any programming intervention.
- The API GEO call based on GeoJSON structure, is one of the features that has been much more awaited in the "location awareness" application now implicit in quite all applications from marketing to logistics. The GEO API is built by the query options making the geo search application integration more easy than ever.
- To have a sort of LUW - Logical Unit Work when many documents are involved into a single update process. The changing of one document is related to its status information but it must be synchronized with all the other documents involved in the process.
August 11, 2016
Cloudant - Build more. Sleep more.
We use Cloudant as our primary data store for a marketplace solution.
- Cloudant is flexible and fast. From basic document storage, to aggregate data requests, to creating graph data models, Cloudant was flexible enough to handle it.
- Cloudant events every record change enabling an easy way to event everything.
- The Cloudant support team is fantastic.
- At the time, filtered replication is sub-optimal for large data sets. This will improve over time.
- The divide (cost & performance) from tenant to dedicated is a bit wide for startups.
August 03, 2016
Cloudant: the best choice for my company
We use Cloudant with ACRA to track errors from our different mobile apps. Through Cloudant our company was able to optimize our workflow and make our apps better.
- Cloudant is cloud. Through Cloudant our company was able to connect all of our services into a single database in a very easy and faster way. This made our maintenance and analysis about our services much easier.
- Cloudant is elastic. This is very important in business today. We spend only what we really need and have used. Nothing more.
- Cloudant is very easy. Our company was able to connect Cloudant with all of our services and apps very easily. In a few weeks Cloudant was completely integrated to our services.
- Our company team is completely integrated with Cloudant. The service is great and any new feature will be welcome.
August 01, 2016
Short and sweet
It's our primary store for user-generated and transactional data.
- Scalability.
- Fast ingest rates.
- Fault tolerance.
- Great for building data pipelines (_changes streams).
- I'd like to have an option of specifying a view (or multiple views) for the _changes stream that will be used to process the documents returned alongside changes (with include_docs=true)
- Database-specific monitoring dashboards would be great.
- Ability to tweak job priorities (on dedicated clusters).
We currently use Cloudant to store call detail records for our faxing platform. The platform itself stores these records, but the API is not easy to query. So we take every single record and store them in Cloudant. This includes not only the basic sender and receiver information, but also per minute costs for each fax. This allows us to easily present incoming and outgoing faxes to our users via our client portal. It's also great for the billing department in that they can quickly query the recordings for profit and cost analysis.
- It stores a very large amount of information very efficiently. Granted, we're just storing call detail records, but we're storing 200K records in 50MB.
- Querying isn't as fancy as SQL-based databases. But if you know what you need and can get it in a view, it is very fast. I'm querying both date and phone number without any issues.
- The UI for managing your databases is top notch. We can build views and searches, and query those with issues. This lets us refine and perfect our JS functions and queries very easily.
- Search Queries. They work when they work, but some of the documentation is a tad confusing and the bookmark system of pagination is not great.
July 20, 2016
I traded self-hosted for Cloudant
Cloudant started off as our database backup system, replicating from our production servers to the Cloudant service. We were configured to fail over to them in the event of a local database outage. Cloudant's uptime and search features were so impressive, we switched over to using them as our primary backbone, with replication now going to a different set of servers. Cloudant delivered a high level of service, and we were able to grow as a result.
- Outstanding query interface
- Full text searching!
- Remarkable uptime and support
- I would love to able to have more performance advice on my database.
July 19, 2016
Cloudant - help you manage your cloud
We were developing an IOT solution to reduce the power consumption in housing communities, for which IBM Bluemix was helping us a lot to achieve it. I was the major developer and architect for the team. Since the project was confined within our department we were using it only within our department.
Our main business objective was to perform data analysis on the data obtained - we had to store the IoT related information in the database and do fast processing on the data so we had to go with NoSQL database and indeed Cloudant was readily available - already integrated with Bluemix and much easier option was it stores the data as JSON which was much more convenient to our use case.
Our main business objective was to perform data analysis on the data obtained - we had to store the IoT related information in the database and do fast processing on the data so we had to go with NoSQL database and indeed Cloudant was readily available - already integrated with Bluemix and much easier option was it stores the data as JSON which was much more convenient to our use case.
- Easy integration
- Better performance
- High availability
- Very limited functionality
- Not much cloudant database management tools available
January 13, 2016
The best prices and easy from start to scale
We use Cloudant to store the data that can't be easily recreated.
- I like that I can group multiple data objects into a single request to reduce the cost.
We are using Cloudant as a base for our search engine! We have a search engine for arabic quotes and proverbs that is extracted from social media, we daily add around 20K records to our Cloudant database. We currently have around 9 million records. Basically we depend on Apache Lucene which is implemented with the database to serve as our search engine.
- The indexing is fast.
- Our data is safe there, we rarely have problems accessing or requesting the data.
- One great thing is that we can address different boolean functions in our queries.
- The ability to talk to the database through web services is great.
- The analytic reports about the use of the database needs improvements.
- A year or 6 months reports for the post/get hits will be great add.
January 04, 2016
6 months of Cloudant. So far so good ;)
We are using Cloudant as storage for events data and logs for further analysis.
January 04, 2016
Cloudant is a must have tool for mobile developers
I am the founder of my 1 person startup, which develops a mobile application for virtual Stock Trading. The mobile app originally stored all user data (their portfolio, watchlist, account balance etc.) on the device itself. There were several scenarios where users ended up losing their app's data, for example hardware upgrades, OS upgrades on the same device, factory reset of the device. Also, because data was stored locally on the mobile device, users were tied down to using only one device.
The problems Cloudant solves for this app:
1. Persisting user's across physical device upgrades, OS upgrades on the same device, factory reset of the device, uninstall-reinstall of the application.
2. Synchronizing data between multiple devices for the same user giving them a true cloud experience which was lacking before.
As of now, I only have one product and it uses Cloudant. However I am extremely pleased with my experience with Cloudant and plan to use Cloudant for my future products as well.
- Wide array of client-side libraries (Android, iPhone, Java PHP, JavaScript to name a few) provided by Cloudant make development easier and streamlined.
- It is not JUST a DB - Ability to write JavaScript code on the Cloudant server makes it function as a web service provider along with a DB.
- Cloudant is a true DBaaS provider. It is as close to one-click setup as it can be, and deployments take almost no time.
- Cloudant provides bidirectional data replication
- REST APIs
- Per-document read privileges would be nice
- Content Push - It would be good to see an in-built feature where a pool of clients can be linked to one or more documents so every time a document changes, the pool of clients linked to that document are notified of changes.
- Provide a few templates for creating Filters on the DB.
January 04, 2016
Cloudant, great for ACRA
We decided to use Cloudant to implement an error handling database using ACRA on our Android Applications. First we tested it with a new application; after our first experience we decided to use it across all developments.
We needed a repository suited for ACRA to alert on any crashes our applications could experience. We looked for information and Cloudant's name appeared.
We needed a repository suited for ACRA to alert on any crashes our applications could experience. We looked for information and Cloudant's name appeared.
- Fair cost and possibility to stay on free usage program.
- High availability. Our databases never ever experienced falls.
- Fair documentation access. We could find tutorials across the web.
- The learning curve could be a little tough if used for first time.
- UI could be redundant and unintuitive in some cases (at least about 1 year ago).
- Little integration with other tools
January 04, 2016
Cloundant Just Works! The best for us: The API.
We use cloudant as trustable path for a project associated with the Internet of Things. We control assets via a sensor and collect information about the gps position, their visibility and the time it has being registered. We save that in a local CouchDB database and use cloudant to replicate that information in a secure way.
- Documentation. You really do well in that.
- Reliability. We think IBM cloudant makes us feel secure with our data, we manage sensible information that we don't want to be open to the world.
- Time. Everything can be done quickly. No too many configuration steps. The Cloudant API just works
- Lack of a local version. We have to use alternatives as CouchDB or pouchdb.
- The integration with other nosql databases should be easier.
- Official wrappers for languages like python. That would be very useful.
January 04, 2016
Cloudant DBaaS review
Cloudant is being used widely in our company across several projects while some of our classified data is still stored on our self-managed servers. DBaaS does save lots of work on deployment and maintenance, moreover, since most of our projects are hosted with Softlayer, where Cloudant hosts with as well, the network latency between our servers and Cloudant doesn't have significant impacts. In addition, NoSQL introduces a new way to make the query and big data storage easier with the understandable API context, programmers who are not familiar with database operations can still figure out the logic at the data processing part.
- DBaaS means there is no need to deploy your own servers, which saves you the initial investment on hardwares.
- Cloudant uses JSON as storage data format, which is commonly supported by all languages. As a result, no cost on data conversion.
- Owing to the relationship between Cloudant and IBM, they can always get the best support and discounts for customers. For example, choosing Cloudant single tenant plan with hosting at Softlayer, there will be some discounts for you.
- The single tenant plan seems to be expensive for some SMEs - data size may not reach the half of its minimum storage size, however, multi-tenant makes them feel unsafe for their business information.
- The query language is not friendly for developers who are just moved from the SQL (MySQL, MSSQL...etc). It requires totally different skills.
December 17, 2015
Cloudant can give you headstart
We moved our SQL server database to Cloudant to allow for quick changes and easy testing. Using Cloudant allows for a super easy clone of the database with a simple one HTTP request. It also allows us to change our data schema without the craft related to SQL based databases. I had to write a small Object-Document-Mapper and didn't have to change the rest of the application. The price of using Cloudant was lower than a hosted SQL server.
- Easy setup
- Easy schema changes
- Easy backup and restore
- The tools for browsing and changing data