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%
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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
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- No setup fee
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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 Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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September 22, 2021
IBM Cloudant review
Our department uses IBM Cloudant as a distributed NoSQL database solution for web-based applications. IBM Cloudant allows rapid writes of unstructured JSON data received on a second-by-second basis also it is NoSQL so it is not required to take care of [the] schema of the table application. It also allows effective use of map-reduce to aggregate results out of collections defined within IBM Cloudant databases, allowing for millions of records to be aggregated and used effectively for analytics and reporting.
- IBM Cloudant allows rapid writes of unstructured JSON data received on a second-by-second basis.
- It also allows effective use of map-reduce to aggregate results out of collections defined within IBM Cloudant databases, allowing for millions of records to be aggregated and used effectively for analytics and reporting.
- Simple and straight forward to use and embed into the application.
- Limited support/documentation for programming languages such as Python, Perl, and R.
- Time to index large databases needs to be improved.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use IBM Cloudant for the hospital mobile health application. We also use IBM Cloudant as our primary database backup system and I can say everything has been working well. The IBM Cloudant uptime and search features are what make it best as our database backup system. IBM Cloudant delivers high-level service.
- Perfect query interface
- Great uptime
- The support team is amazing
- Great documentation
- Easy setup
- Less IBM Cloudant database management features
- The analytic reports seems off to me
- Downloading data from IBM Cloudant [I feel] can sometimes be a painful process.
April 28, 2021
Scaling our data layer without headaches
Cloudant allows us to scale our data layer without worrying about the operations side of things to manage such a big cluster. Cloudant is the main database system for our company. It's business critical for our company and our many customers rely on its performance on a daily basis to perform their activities.
- Scale your data layer without issues.
- Great support team.
- Very few operational problems
- No detailed monitoring (which views are used or not, performance metrics) on top of the basic stuff provided by CouchDB
- No playground environment to test some very large map/reduce queries (and therefore any changes in the design have to reindex the whole DB).
- Pricing is quite steep
- No integrated backup features, as you'd expect from an enterprise product
November 22, 2020
Cloudant the best companion to IBM Blockchain Platform
We use Cloudant for replicate data from our Blockchain platform. With Cloudant we can make queries and reports for our managers that want to see how the transactions in blockchain are working. It's very user friendly and it's stable too. Without it we did not have any visibility of the transactions.
- User Friendly
- High availability
- High tolerance
- Load Balancing
- Manage blob objects
- Client APIs
Cloudant is being used as the main storage system for all my current projects. Being able to easily retrieve and publish data to Cloudant over a standard and proven protocol has made it much easier to implement storage in any language and system required. Having such easily available storage has sped up the entire development process greatly.
- Support has been great addressing any issues.
- The documentation is very easy and straight forward to follow.
- The many storage locations and migration capabilities allow for quick and easy access to data wherever needed.
- Not supporting temporary views can be limiting at times.
January 22, 2020
Great and reliable DBaaS for IoT use cases
We used IBM Cloudant as a distributed, fully managed JSON database for IoT use cases. API integration was a must, and all the support to Apache CouchDB made a positive difference. Overall support and documentation from IBM Cloudant were satisfactory, as well as pricing. Global availability was generally good, except for China. Availability and SLAs were never a problem and the platform has always been stable.
- API integration and support through CouchDB standards.
- Managed Services.
- Global availability, especially in Asia.
- IBM Cloudant support is generally robust, but in some occasions we had to find solutions by ourselves.
November 11, 2019
IBM Cloudant is great!
We use Cloudant as an IBM proposed DB solution for dedicated cloud foundry IBM cloud environments. The initial structure is for a weird implementation to use Cloudant, as we are using it as a cache for some middle life data. I know cache is not the right implementation for Cloudant, but it offered database sync between datacenters.
- 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.
- Limited support for popular programming languages such as Python, Perl, and R.
- No support for SQL.
- No support for XML.
- The lack of memory capabilities.
September 10, 2019
IBM Cloud Bound Services Optimize the Solution
Currently, it's being used by our E-commerce Team, which spans all our digital solutions. It's currently used along with the Node-Red instance hosted within the IBM environment with multiple such instances supporting multiple Cloudant databases for all the database and storage-related facilities. IBM Cloudant helps manage it and is a very easy to adapt format helping with quick deployments.
- It is NoSQL
- It has better performance than Mongo Atlas
- Queries are easy to use and support for views is also helpful
- Speed of searching through records can be improved.
- Some ML to predict enhancement in queries can surely help IBM and clients mutually target optimal solutions.
- Views accepting multiple parameters.
August 29, 2019
Best for mobile
Cloudant is the database for all our mobile applications with offline-first architecture, and it's the best option to keep everything synced and secure.
This is the best way to use CouchDB, because Cloudant adds the authorization layer required for a real live app, and also the infinite capacity with the flexibility to grow from $0 to whatever is required according to the amount of users you need to support.
Also, we have now using Cloudant as the main database for data capture apps and the source for all our catalogs in order to free resources from our rdbms system.
Finally, considering CouchDB is part of Bluemix, you will have the chance to grow, adding on more services for your app.
This is the best way to use CouchDB, because Cloudant adds the authorization layer required for a real live app, and also the infinite capacity with the flexibility to grow from $0 to whatever is required according to the amount of users you need to support.
Also, we have now using Cloudant as the main database for data capture apps and the source for all our catalogs in order to free resources from our rdbms system.
Finally, considering CouchDB is part of Bluemix, you will have the chance to grow, adding on more services for your app.
- Authentication improved with the API keys
- Synchronization with https, which means secure and trustable syncs
- Scale in a transparent way
- Free start with the $50 allowance makes Cloudant the best way to start
- It would be nice to have a way to import bulk data
- There must be a better way to check usage. There are a lot of transactions not shown in the actual report
- There must be a way to reset a db -- a way to set the actual data as the base and eliminate all deleted docs
February 22, 2019
IBM Cloudant Experience
It is being used as a noSQL database across the organization for big data analytics and is used amongst other things for text analytics as it permits unlimited index fields.
- Coudant allows unlimited secondary index fields when compared to others that have certain limitations.
- Cloudant also has the ability to do bi-directional sync for replication and synchronization.
- Cloudant can run on bare metal and virtual machines.
- Cloudant can also be deployed in multi-user or private cloud environments.
- very easy to program and build apps
- Sometimes, there are no slower response times [than] when trying to pull records - I mean that slowness is in terms of milli-seconds :-)
- I wish it has in memory computing capability
- XML is still not supported by this product
February 15, 2019
Cloudant Review
We have been using Cloudant as part of a CEAN stack for various different prototypes that we build for different clients, we mainly use Cloudant because it is hosted in the cloud and has a free tier for when we are only experimenting.
- Adding and deleting documents in the UI is intuitive
- The UI is helpful for managing the data
- It is hosted on the cloud and doesn’t require much set up to get going
- The @Cloudant/Cloudand npm SDK has very limited functionality when compared to MongoDB, the Cloudant queries that can be made with JSON is good however, but it is not obvious from the start that you can do this.
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.
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 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 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 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