IBM Cloud Databases are open source data stores for enterprise application development. Built on a Kubernetes foundation, they offer a database platform for serverless applications. They are designed to scale storage and compute resources seamlessly without being constrained by the limits of a single server. Natively integrated and available in the IBM Cloud console, these databases are now available through a consistent consumption, pricing, and interaction model. They aim to provide a cohesive…
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SingleStore
Score 7.5 out of 10
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SingleStore aims to enable organizations to scale from one to one million customers, handling SQL, JSON, full text and vector workloads in one unified platform.
Less Appropriate Scenario: 1) Small Scale or Low Budget Projects 2) Organizations with limited expertise in cloud technologies may find the learning curve steep, especially if they are not familiar with the IBM Cloud platform 3) If database requirements are highly dynamic and change frequently, the comprehensive features and management provided by IBM Cloud Databases might be overkill. A more flexible, self-managed solution could be preferable for adapting to rapid changes.
Well-Suited Scenarios: Real-Time Analytics: Financial trading platforms requiring instant insights. Operational Dashboards: Retail businesses monitoring live sales. IoT Data Processing: Smart device monitoring with high data ingestion. Fraud Detection: Banks detect suspicious transactions instantly. Less Appropriate Scenarios: Archival Storage: Cold data storage with infrequent access. Low-Volume Workloads: Small-scale apps with minimal data processing needs. Complex ETL Pipelines: Heavy data transformations without real-time demands.
The ease of setup was effortless. For anyone with development experience, a few simple questions such as name and login data will get you set up.
The web application to manage cluster settings, billing settings and even introspect the data was simple and most importantly worked all the time. This can not always be said for web interfaces of other products.
Better cost reports, before just increasing to another tier, thus increasing the price. This is critical for early stage startups, where budget is tight.
Add more data center options. As a comparison, a similar service, Aiven.io has dozen more options than Compose (basically all big cloud providers). We moved from AWS to Digital Ocean, which made us stop using Compose, since Compose forces us to be either on IBM or AWS.
It does not release a patch to have back porting; it just releases a new version and stops support; it's difficult to keep up to that pace.
Support engineers lack expertise, but they seem to be improving organically.
Lacks enterprise CDC capability: Change data capture (CDC) is a process that tracks and records changes made to data in a database and then delivers those changes to other systems in real time.
For enterprise-level backup & restore capability, we had to implement our model via Velero snapshot backup.
IBM Cloud Databases' pricing structure is easy to understand, and if you choose the right product, you can operate your system at minimal cost. Although there is ample documentation available, there doesn't seem to be a user community running on it, so specific usage know-how and troubleshooting can sometimes take longer than expected.
[Until it is] supported on AWS ECS containers, I will reserve a higher rating for SingleStore. Right now it works well on EC2 and serves our current purpose, [but] would look forward to seeing SingleStore respond to our urge of feature in a shorter time period with high quality and security.
When it comes to ingestion speed, SingleStore is probably at the top. Being able to create pipelines using SQL to ingest data from S3, Kafka, and other sources, is a great advantages. This means you can dynamically ingest data by customizing your SQL queries. SingleStore pipelines are pretty sophisticated, yet very simple. Few lines of codes and you are ingesting data, while still able to perform analytical queries on your billions of row tables.
Support is helpful enough, but we haven't always had questions answered in a satisfactory manner. At one time we realized that Compose had stopped taking database snapshots on its two-per-day schedule, and had in fact not taken one for many days. Support recognized the problem and it was fixed, but the lack of proactive checks and the inability to share exactly what happened has caused us to look elsewhere for production work loads
The support deep dives into our most complexed queries and bizarre issues that sometimes only we get comparing to other clients. Our special workload (thousands of Kafka pipelines + high concurrency of queries). The response match to the priority of the request, P1 gets immediate return call. Missing features are treated, they become a client request and being added to the roadmap after internal consideration on all client needs and priority. Bugs are patched quite fast, depends on the impact and feasible temporary workarounds. There is no issue that we haven't got a proper answer, resolution or reasoning
We allowed 2-3 months for a thorough evaluation. We saw pretty quickly that we were likely to pick SingleStore, so we ported some of our stored procedures to SingleStore in order to take a deeper look. Two SingleStore people worked closely with us to ensure that we did not have any blocking problems. It all went remarkably smoothly.
The reason why I choose IBM Cloud Databases is that the IBM cloud toolset is already being used in other functions of the company and by using IBM Cloud Databases, the other cloud tools are better embedded and integrated. If the company is set to use amazon tools, I would go for rds.
Reduces database sprawl, ETL costs, infrastructure expenses, etc. Supports horizontal scaling, unlike PostgreSQL & Aurora, and real-time analytics and fast transactions (HTAP), unlike Snowflake & ClickHouse.Handles high-volume workloads with thousands of concurrent queries. No need for ETL processes, unlike BigQuery & Snowflake. Works with JSON, relational, and key-value data, unlike ClickHouse.
Lower operational complexity - Installation and maintenance is pretty easy
Object scale when used can compete with Traditional Warehouse Systems like Teradata, Netezza, Greenplum
Adds lot of value to the business like couple of operations which never worked in traditional DBMS including HANA, Oracle In Memory, SQL Server In Memory just flew in SingleStore
