IBM Cloud Databases vs. Valentina

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.

Incentivized

If you have to manage a lot of different databases from different vendors, you could do well by standardizing on this product. It checks all the boxes for a proper database management studio. You would only have to learn one product to manage them all. However, if you are looking to find a good product for a single database vendor, you might be better off finding a tool that was designed specifically for that vendor product.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Foreign Key Constraint data viewer! This was a tremendously helpful feature that not many other products have. Just pick a constraint and see the data in the child tables! No setup required!
• Supports any and every database imaginable.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Somewhat laggy performance. Boot up speed was on the slow side and connecting to our database servers was also a little slower than other products.
• User interface can be a little clunky. Instead of the usual tree view of servers, databases, and schemas, you are presented with lists that you click on and get new windows to pick the new list of data from. Not organized efficiently.

Incentivized

I am very fond of the features and reliability of the compose DaaS, however I could switch if I find same qualities for lower price.

Incentivized

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.

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Compared to Microsoft's SQL Management Studio, Valentina studio was comparable, just harder to get used to in the UI department. It ran slightly slower than other products but did save some time with neat features they baked into the product. However, in using DBeaver Community and DBForge Studio for PostgreSQL from Devart, we found different products that the team ultimately decided to use. DBeaver has all of the features we needed most (minus the constraint data viewer) and a more intuitive UI that we were used to. DBForge Studio for PostgreSQL has a very standard Windows look and feel and lacks some features, like database/table designers, but makes up for those shortcomings in the much easier filtering and sorting options right in the data grids. You can even write a query and edit the data returned, which is something we don't see in many of these tools. Our team ultimately settled on the developers using DBeaver and the support team that needs data viewing/editing capabilities using DBForge Studio.

Incentivized

• Prove use cases prior to administering entire platform, obtain ROI faster
• Able to achieve the technological components of our advanced analytics team without full scale purchase of AI platform
• Developed several studies to prove out cloud Db value, speed to deploy

Incentivized

• It saved time in some areas of finding child data by not having to write queries to find it.
• The user interface caused some extra training for some users and ultimately caused them to not like using it.

Incentivized