Couchbase Server vs. Astra DB

Best suited when edge devices have interrupted internet connection. And Couchbase provides reliable data transfer. If used for attachment Couchbase has a very poor offering. A hard limit of 20 MB is not okay. They have the best conflict resolution but not so great query language on Couchbase lite.

Incentivized

We use Astra DB to improve our management systems. Storing data has become hassle-free and quite simple. When launching a Cassandra-based cloud application, Astra DB is exactly what you need. In addition to the standard training programs and videos, the extended support and training require significant additional effort to activate and cover which I feel is a bit more tedious task.

Incentivized

• Easy to store unstructured data and has great performance
• Managing security is super easy which can be managed across different levels
• UI is pretty simple to use and manage the cluster
• Backup of the data is very easy and the restoration/recovery is fairly easy as well with the in-built tools.
• Easy integration with elasticsearch for replication
• It is fairly easy to scale up or scale down the cluster

Incentivized

• We need to be able to process a lot of data (our biggest clients process hundreds of milions of transactions every month). However, it is not only the amount of data, it is also an unpredictable patterns with spikes occuring at different points of time - something athat Astra is great at.
• Our processing needs to be extremaly fast. Some of our clients use our enrichment in a synchronous way, meaning that any delay in processing is holding up the whole transaction lifecycle and can have a major impact on the client. Astra is very fast.
• A close collaboration with GCP makes our life very easy. All of our technology sits in Google Cloud, so having Astra in there makes it a no-brainer solution for us.

Incentivized

• Cluster sizing during the design phase can be improved, especially if the client lacks prior experience. Vendor consultants are very meticulous in order to provide best of class performance and response time, although some more real-world pragmatic approach is often needed.
• Couchbase Lite 2 went thru a major revamp, which broke the compatibility of the applications with some features removed and other changed. That needed development teams working to refactor the applications.

Incentivized

• Astra DB might be difficult to understand for people who are unfamiliar with Apache Cassandra. Improving the initial experience for newcomers, as well as offering better documentation and lessons, might be advantageous.
• The Astra DB ecosystem may be enhanced by expanding the ecosystem of plugins, integrations, and community-contributed solutions.

Incentivized

I rarely actually use Couchbase Server, I just stay up-to-date with the features that it provides. However, when the need arises for a NoSQL datastore, then I will strongly consider it as an option

Incentivized

Couchbase has been quite a usable for our implementation. We had similar experience with our previous "trial" implementation, however it was short lived.

Couchbase has so far exceeded expectation. Our implementation team is more confident than ever before.

When we are Live for more than 6 months, I'm hoping to enhance this rating.

It's a great product but suffers with counters. This isn't a deal breaker but lets down what is otherwise a good all round solution

Incentivized

One of Couchbase’s greatest assets is its performance with large datasets. Properly set up with well-sized clusters, it is also highly reliable and scalable. User management could be better though, and security often feels like an afterthought. Couchbase has improved tremendously since we started using it, so I am sure that these issues will be ironed out.

Incentivized

I haven't had many opportunities to request support, I will look forward to better the rating. We have technical development and integration team who reach out directly to TAM at Couchbase.

Their response time is fast, in case you do not contact them during business hours, they give a very good follow-up to your case. They also facilitate video calls if necessary for debugging.

Incentivized

Couchbase could outperform it's competition considerably for database reads and writes. Full text searches were still faster in Elasticsearch but this is more of a feature than a base platform requirement for us.

Incentivized

We also (briefly) considered building in-house. We wanted to avoid complex "Frankenstein" architectures. Combining Pinecone with another NoSQL datastore like DynamoDB would have increased complexity. A single-managed platform (Astra DB) enabled architectural simplicity and strong reliability, allowing Maester’s development team to prioritize high-value, customer-facing features

Incentivized

So far, the way that we mange and upgrade our clusters has be very smooth. It works like a dream when we use it in concert with AWS and their EC2 machines. Having access to powerful instances along side the Couchbase interface is amazing and allows us to do rebalances or maintenance without a worry

Incentivized

We are well aware of the Cassandra architecture and familiar with the open source tooling that Datastax provides the industry (K8sSandra / Stargate) to scale Cassandra on Kubernetes.

Having prior knowledge of Cassandra / Kubernetes means we know that under the hood Astra is built on infinitely scalable technologies. We trust that the foundations that Astra is built on will scale so we know Astra will scale.

Incentivized

• There have been several areas of our application [that] really needed an ACID compliant database (e.g. strong transactional guarantees) that we thought we could work around while using Couchbase. [In my opinion] that turned out to be a poor bet. You need to be certain that the specific characteristics of a NoSQL database fit your problem.
• Couchbase does eliminate the need for schema upgrades completely. I.e no downtime or conversion windows as you migrate your data model, adding attributes, etc. This helped with the deployment timeframe associated with DB changes.
• The database is (apparently) a bit more of a space/memory consumer than originally anticipated. During deployments, we received constant pressure from Couchbase consulting teams to eliminate/reduce the number of indexes, and this was because any mutations to docs in a bucket must check for impact against all indexes. More recent years have started to address this with their "collections" features, which helps isolate indexes to specific sub-groupings of documents.

Incentivized

• Database growth planning is less of a concern with Astra, as it scales automatically.
• Currently, they lack fine-grained security at the table level. I suspect that will change over time.
• If your load has peaks and valleys; Astra enables only paying for Reads/Writes; thus you do not need to pay for large servers to support peaks in load.

Incentivized