Overview
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…
Outstanding Services and products!!!
Happily moved back to cloudant after hosting my own couchdb for a few years.
My words on IBM cloudant
Cloudant – I Use It With My Erlang Stack
A simple database with fully-featured GUI, "just works" scaling and replication, and straightforward pricing
IBM Cloudant review
IBM Cloudant is the best hosted CouchDB out there
IBM Cloudant - Great For Mobile and Web Based Applications
Great advantages and simplicity of deployment. It is as I would summarize the Cloudant service from IBM.
Great experience with Cloudant
Scaling our data layer without headaches
Win-Win for IBM Cloud
I like it, but not quite sure I love it
Cloudant the best companion to IBM Blockchain Platform
Awards
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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
Standard
$75
Lite
Free
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Features
NoSQL Databases
NoSQL databases are designed to be used across large distrusted systems. They are notably much more scalable and much faster and handling very large data loads than traditional relational databases.
- 9.8Performance(21) Ratings
How fast the database performs under data load
- 8.1Availability(21) Ratings
Availability is the probability that the NoSQL database will be available to preform its function when called upon.
- 9.9Concurrency(21) Ratings
Concurrency is the ability for multiple processes to access or change shared data simultaneously. The greater the number of concurrent user processes that can execute without blocking each other, the greater the concurrency of the database system.
- 9.8Security(21) Ratings
Security features include authentication against external security mechanisms liker LDAP, Windows Active Directory, and authorization or privilege management. Some NoSQL databases also support encryption.
- 9.1Scalability(21) Ratings
NoSQL databases are inherently more stable than relational databases and have built-in support for replication and partitioning of data to support scalability.
- 9.9Data model flexibility(21) Ratings
NoSQL databases do not rely on rely on tables, columns, rows, or schemas to organize and retrieve data, but use use more flexible data models to accommodate the large volume and variety of data being generated by modern applications.
- 9.1Deployment model flexibility(21) Ratings
Can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud.
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is IBM Cloudant?
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
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
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(123)Attribute Ratings
- 7.3Likelihood to Renew1 rating
- 8.2Availability1 rating
- 8.2Performance1 rating
- 7.7Usability5 ratings
- 8.6Support Rating4 ratings
- 7.3Online Training2 ratings
- 8.2Implementation Rating4 ratings
- 8.5Configurability3 ratings
- 9.6Product Scalability23 ratings
- 9.1Vendor pre-sale1 rating
- 8.2IBM Cloudant Usability2 ratings
Reviews
(1-5 of 5)Scaling our data layer without headaches
- 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
- Performance
- 80%8.0
- Availability
- 90%9.0
- Concurrency
- 90%9.0
- Security
- 60%6.0
- Scalability
- 90%9.0
- Data model flexibility
- 100%10.0
- Deployment model flexibility
- 70%7.0
- Ability to quickly scale and launch a new tenant on the system
- Test the architecture on CouchDB helped us to address initial design flaws.
- The migration to Cloudant as such was very painless.
- We have migrate our replication system to Cloudant Android Sync for mobile devices.
- We have regular informal contact with the Cloudant leadership to discuss our use cases and implementation strategies.
- Operations
Skills required:
- JSON
- Javascript (views), we use nano for the Node.js parts of the application
- Map/reduce concepts
- Document design.
- Java (we use Ektorp for the Java parts of the application)
- Storing the business transactions performed offline
- Storing usage metrics
- Storing content configuration documents
- Reporting on all of the above.
- Distributed replications
- Waiting on some really cool use cases for DashDB.
- More reporting with DashDB.
- More ad-hoc reporting.
- Much more storage of data.
- Automatic archiving of the database (e.g. like Amazon Glacier) would be a killer feature.
- Product Features
- Prior Experience with the Product
- Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
- Online training
When you create a database, you can configure the number of internal shards.
Cloudant support can help with the advanced settings if needed.
- Avoid large documents (prefer a lot of small documents).
- Use UUID as _id whenever possible to avoid naming conflicts (especially in distributed environments where you don't control this).
- Learn to write efficient views (instead of search)
- Learn about handling the 429 error code!
- You don't need to have replication of the data on 8 nodes by default (check out the Q parameter)
- Editing the docs in the dashboard
- Writing ad-hoc queries
- Permissions management
- The Dashboard is slow and takes time to load many databases.
- Writing a new map/reduce view indexes the entire DB for every change. In Couchbase, you have a feature to create a view for a subset of the data, this is very convenient.
- Pure response time speed is actually something to be improved.
- The performance of the Dashboard (especially with a lot of databases) needs improvement.
There are a few cases where we noticed issues: some replication jobs were not properly triggered (this is a long standing issue that we are dealing with with the support team).
CSM have also been helpful at times.
- Implemented in-house
- Designing the documents to be scalable.
- (Manually) sharding of the document on many databases was a key design decision for us (we shard per "day"), so that we can more replicate back and forth.
- Designing performing views for large amounts of document (ad-hoc reporting) is very tricky.
IBM Cloudant is great!
- 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.
- Performance
- 80%8.0
- Availability
- 100%10.0
- Concurrency
- 90%9.0
- Security
- 80%8.0
- Scalability
- 90%9.0
- Data model flexibility
- 90%9.0
- Deployment model flexibility
- 90%9.0
- 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
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Prior Experience with the Product
- Vendor Reputation
- Existing Relationship with the Vendor
- Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
IBM Cloudant, Great Managed NoSQL at Significant Cost
- 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 allowed us to implement a project faster due to it being fully managed and basically a plug-and-play type data store.
- Being fully managed meant that we spent a fair bit of time on the phone yelling at IBM Support because they didn't know jack about how to solve the issues we ran into/
- Overall Cloudant worked for us because the project timeline and budget allowed for more money to be spent on services rather than hardware (OpEx vs CapEx).
- Product Features
- Prior Experience with the Product
- Vendor Reputation
- Existing Relationship with the Vendor
Short and sweet
- 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).
- Elasticsearch and CouchDB
We use Elasticsearch alongside Cloudant these days, since _changes streams make it easy to feed data from Cloudant into Elasticsearch. Cloudant's search engine works well, but Elasticsearch makes it easier to visualise data through Kibana.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
- Vendor Reputation
- Building data pipelines.
- Map-reduce.
- Search.
- Monitoring the activity of each database (as opposed to the whole cluster).
- Accessing shared databases via the dashboard (some features need improving).
- Tracking the progress of indexing jobs could be easier, some kind of a progress bar would be useful.
- 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.
- Call Detail Record Storage
- Billing Data Storage
- Faxing Data
- I use complex keys with Cloudant views to query not just CDRs by phone, but by date as well. Range queries on views are great!
- I would really like to integrate it with InfluxDB and some monitoring software to create a more performant and efficient monitoring platform. Many software out there like to use ElasticSearch, but ElasticSearch is very costly resource-wise.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- It does what it says on the box. Stores data, retrieves data, queries data with Map/Reduce and full text search.
- Full text search can be really tricky to get working correctly. It works, but then you find it's not quite querying the way you expect it.
- Implemented in-house
- Getting queries working correctly. I was new to how views worked so I went down the full text path only to find it didn't quite worked out how I thought. Then I realize that phone numbers are just long number and went that route with ranged keys on views.