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Flexible data transportation HUB without structure constraints
August 12, 2016

Flexible data transportation HUB without structure constraints

Romualdo Gobbo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller

Overall Satisfaction with Cloudant

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.
  • 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.
As a DB-as-a-Service, Cloudant has freed us from this kind of problem. Using the IBM Bluemix dashboard you can control how many transaction are executed in milliseconds and this is for now our rating of scalability between 200-24 milliseconds for one http POST (insert document), well under the project rate that was defined by an order of magnitude.
All other NoSQL document-centric DB must be installed on premise on in the cloud as complicated clusters. The "as a service" formula and the open source origin were the same reasons for Cloudant choice, freeing us of all system and administration tasks!
Cloudant is perfect when you have to manage fixed documents, but with different content and an articulated data hierarchy. Furthermore it maintains many document structures in one instance of the DB. Cloudant should be used when the document has a "lazy" life cycle (better if it is only based on its workflow status information) and it is not comparable to an OLTP system where the data is constantly being updated.