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…
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Features
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Product Details
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- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
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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(123)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
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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
82.85714285714286%
8.3
- Ability to quickly scale and launch a new tenant on the system
Actually, none. Since we rely on Cloudant.
10
- Developers
- Operations
- Operations
We don't have any engineering working specifically on the support. Of course some of the developers are involved with Cloudant on a day-to-day basis.
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)
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.
No
- Product Features
- Prior Experience with the Product
- Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
Features, since we rely on CouchDB's interface. But also the gold support contract that gives us peace of mind and a dedicated support engineer in case of questions. We have been very happy with the support provided to our team.
No, we are happy with the service. The selection process was very simple since we were already using Cloudant through the Heroku connector (which was unexpectedly terminated, to be honest).
- Online training
- Avoid as much as possible the Cloudant Search
- 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)
- 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)
No - there is no facility to customize the interface
No - the product does not support adding custom code
Everything can be driven by API requests (even stuff like scheduling, creation of custom shards type), it's very rich and well documented.
- 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.
Monthly spending credits were slightly discounted compared to base list price.
N/A
Yes
We have a gold support contract.
Yes
Yes, some deployments done a few months ago were related to some issues we raised.
Our account contact director Chris Snow is helping us to develop some extensions to Cloudant Sync during his free time.
- Implemented in-house
Change management was a minor issue with the implementation
We designed the system around the CouchDB architecture, so this was always part of the implementation since day one. Cloudant actually provided the "service" around the CouchDB technology.
- 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.
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.
The technology behind Cloudant (BigCouch) is no better or worse than any of these. They are all good for different reasons. What makes Cloudant my choice against them is the hosted portion. These are all just databases that I would have to manage. Cloudant is managed for me, and still runs the queries I need.
5
They don't realize they are using it. They are not developing with Cloudant, but instead it's being used as their back end. It's used mainly for Call Detail Record and billing storage for a faxing server. As faxing occurs on the server, the details are sent to Cloudant. This allows us to more quickly query and parse the data. Using three views I can pull up incoming andoutgoing faxes and billing information for each number. So our clients use it to look at their faxes, our employees use it for support, and our accounting staff uses it for billing.
1
It's not difficult. Any web developer should be able to get going with it. It takes some knowledge in JS, APIs, JSON, and how Cloudant stores and queries for information. You should start by knowing the first three. The last one can be figured out using Cloudant's documentation (which is pretty thorough. The most difficult part for many developers I think would be throwing out the SQL way of doing things. That doesn't work here. You need to think like a document database.
- 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.
No
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
It was the features. I needed to store a lot of data quickly, and be able to query it without bringing down a server.
I would not change a thing. The core problem arose when querying for fax data would bring down our client portal on every single load. The fax server just refused to cooperate. Then and now, there are few products that would do what I need for little upfront costs. Most would require that I self-host, which I do not have time for.
- 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.
Yes, but I don't use it
No
I have yet to need it. In fact, I've contacted support once. I don't even think it was because of something they've done. Cloudant is reliable enough that I honestly don't think about it's status most of the time. In fact, any time my product stops working it's never been related to Cloudant.
No
- Implemented in-house
No
Change management was minimal
Most of the company didn't notice a change. This was a brand new tool being built for a brand new service. The support team is used to changing how they work so they grabbed hold and moved on.
- 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.