BOSTON, Nov. 28, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Cloudant today announced that AppAdvice is using the Cloudant database as a service (DBaaS) to power its personalized mobile app catalog and review service. AppAdvice has been a top-20 news app in Apple's App Store for two years running, and they chose Cloudant to store their online catalog of more than 700,000 iOS app reviews because of its ability to meet the scalability requirements for their heavily used service.

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More than 400,000 online and mobile visitors use AppAdvice every day to help discover interesting and new iOS apps to use. It helps novice and experienced smart device owners find relevant new apps and reviews by personalizing content based on hobbies, industry verticals, and other relevant themes.

Early on, AppAdvice knew that relational SQL databases would not be a good fit for the variably structured data in their app catalog, so they followed the NoSQL path with Apache CouchDB-based Cloudant. In 2010, they started with a free account using Cloudant's multi-tenant database as a service, which they found to be more scalable and reliable than standard CouchDB. Plus, it was hosted and managed for them so they didn't have to worry about database administration. In 2012, they graduated to a dedicated Cloudant cluster, hosted on the SoftLayer cloud platform, to handle their next phase of growth.

"Cloudant was an important part of our success," said Mahmoud Hafez, founder of AppAdvice.com. "It enabled us to develop an innovative service and was free to use during the early growth of our business. And the Cloudant team takes great care of us around the clock; I've seen database issues arise late at night that get resolved in a few minutes."

With the proliferation of mobile devices, smartphones and tablets, the App Store has transformed the business model for app development and delivery, which has led to an explosion of available consumer and business apps. In fact, Apple reported in July 2012 that iOS device owners alone have now downloaded in excess of 30 billion apps (since the service opened in July 2008) and 5 billion in the last three months, highlighting the importance of App Store visibility and third-party reviews and recommendations.

"AppAdvice provides users with the information necessary to navigate a marketplace that will be nearing or exceeding a million apps by year's end," said Cloudant CEO Derek Schoettle. "As the number of iOS device users and iOS apps continues to rise, AppAdvice's data management situation gets exponentially more difficult to support. Cloudant handles the complexities of scalability for them so their developers can stay focused on improving the user experience — and not on administering their database."

About AppAdvice.com

AppAdvice is the ideal resource on the Web for people looking to discover iOS apps. It thoroughly filters through the 700,000+ apps in the App Store to keep users up to date on relevant news regarding apps, as well as providing detailed app reviews. The focus of AppAdvice.com is not to provide the same monotonous content found all over the Web, but rather aggregate it in a useful way making it easy to figure out which apps users should download, while also providing updates on the latest iOS news, reviews, and iDevice accessories. From its custom AppLists to instantaneously updating its AppsGoneFree app to inform users of discounts on apps, AppAdvice aims to be the one stop shop for everything iDevice-related. For more information visit: http://appadvice.com/appnn.

About Cloudant

Cloudant provides developers of large or fast-growing Web and mobile applications with the world's first globally distributed "data layer as a service" for loading, storing, analyzing, and distributing application data. The Cloudant Data Layer is a managed service that helps developers to eliminate the delays, costs, and distractions inherent in working with databases and their administrators, while providing unmatched scalability, availability, and performance. This capability accelerates time-to-market and time-to-innovation, because it frees developers from the mechanics of data management so they can focus exclusively on creating great applications. Cloudant is privately held and backed by top-tier investors including Avalon Ventures, In-Q-Tel, and Y Combinator. For more information, visit https://cloudant.com/.

SOURCE Cloudant