Great for starting out and easy to use.
February 01, 2018
Great for starting out and easy to use.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with IBM Compose
Our organisation is a fairly-young startup, which is in the business of producing and selling SaaS/web-based software solutions to organisations.
IBM Compose PostgreSQL serves as the main data store for serving our cloud-based application and storing customer data.
IBM Compose PostgreSQL serves as the main data store for serving our cloud-based application and storing customer data.
- It is easy to use and get started (being a standard PostgreSQL implementation).
- Databases autoscale in terms of storage size and resources (based on this size). We haven't had the chance to see this in action as yet though.
- The Asia/Pacific region is included in the list of hosting datacentres which is required for us.
- Initial pricing is low and generally well-suited to startups.
- At-rest encryption of databases apparently is only available for Enterprise subscriptions, which are v expensive and suited to large organisations. To satisfy general security requirements (eg mandatory for Govt-based customers) we need to encrypt any potentially-sensitive data before inserting into the database (which then cannot be queried-against). This is likely to become a bigger issue for us soon.
- The Compose admin console has been pending migration to IBM's cloud portal for a long time, and do not match the original Compose.io site. The IBM cloud portal is also fairly slow for us.
- Support tickets (with the basic-free support tier) raised against IBM for PostgreSQL questions/issues generally take a long time to answer (typically several days).
- PostgreSQL has allowed us to quickly provide a Minimal Viable Product for our cloud-based software offering.
- ElephantSQL, Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL
While using IBM Bluemix to host our SaaS product in the Asia/Pacific region, PostgreSQL suited us for integrating well with IBM Cloud, and also being available within the same geographic region.
Other products that we looked at: ElephantSQL provides At-Rest encryption, but this is not currently available within Asia/Pacific (at the subscription level containing the feature). We also had issues contacting ElephantSQL support.
Other products that we looked at: ElephantSQL provides At-Rest encryption, but this is not currently available within Asia/Pacific (at the subscription level containing the feature). We also had issues contacting ElephantSQL support.
IBM Cloud Databases Feature Ratings
IBM Compose Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
None | Slow Resolution Problems left unsolved Escalation required Difficult to get immediate help Support doesn't seem to care Slow Initial Response |
No - As a business startup, the monthly support expense is too high.