Compose Review
Updated February 23, 2019

Compose Review

Joshua Dickson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloud Databases (formerly Compose)

We use Compose extensively to host our application's database layer which is implemented in MongoDB. MongoDB from Compose helps us in two ways: first of all, it removed significant overhead in having to think about monitoring and maintaining our database systems. Compose also has excellent GIU tools (though they can be a bit slow with large queries) for working with MongoDB.

Pros

  • Database-Interaction GUI best we've worked with
  • Service has been reliable
  • Pricing Is low enough to not think about hosting our own DB layer

Cons

  • Customer service has been lacking at times
  • Technical issues: backups have not always happened on schedule, and customer data has been lost
  • Pricing for follow-on GBs is high
  • Removed man-hours from managing database layer
  • Low-cost for small databases
  • Have not had to think about investing in scaling DB layer
We evaluated several DBaaS providers, the thing that won out for Compose was its GUI which makes working with the database very easy.
It very much depends on use case. For cases with small DBs, or for cases where ease of management is more important than cost, it's a great option. It's also a great starter for people who have not used Mongo and can make use of the GUI tools.

IBM Cloud Databases Feature Ratings

Database-as-a-Service
6.0
Automatic software patching
Not Rated
Database scalability
Not Rated
Automated backups
3
Database security provisions
7
Monitoring and metrics
7
Automatic host deployment
7

IBM Cloud Databases (formerly Compose) Support

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.
ProsCons
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
Difficult to get immediate help
No - We use IBM Cloud Databases (formerly Compose) more on starter and green-fields type projects, because it's very simple to spin up new database instances and the cost profile is acceptable. At larger database sizes, Compose/IBM's pricing has always been prohibitively expensive for hosting. With hosting being that expensive, we look elsewhere for actually deploying more production-oriented workloads in the cloud, and choose to pay for support with those providers.
Unlike with other vendors, I never felt as though I received exceptional support from Compose / IBM Cloud Databases.

Comments

  • Shannon Cardwell | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Shannon Cardwell
    (Vendor Representative) commented 5 years ago
    Hi Joshua, This is Shannon from IBM Cloud, thanking you for your feedback and sharing your experience with Compose, which has been replaced by IBM Cloud Databases. We are glad to hear the interface and reliability of Compose has been valuable to your company and helped lessen the man-hours needed. We apologize for the technical issues you've experienced and hope our customer service can better serve you in the future.  We recently released IBM Cloud Databases, which is the next generation of Compose, which drastically lowers the price of RAM and Disk.  Here is a comparison of the two products, https://www.ibm.com/cloud/blog/ibm-cloud-databases-the-next-generation-of-ibm-compose.

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