Why to move to Azure CosmosDB

CosmosDBThis April 22. I have arranged Global Azure Boot Camp where I speak on DocumentDB and we had some demo as well. Recently, MS has announced the next level of DocumentDB and they call it CosmosDB. In this post I will try to explain CosmosDB and why to move to Azure CosmosDB. Let us first see brief on DocumentDB and then on CosmosDB.

What is DocumentDB?

The name is pretty self explanatory, right? Basically, DocumentDB is used to store non-structured data. As per definition, it is a NoSQL document database service designed from the group up to natively support JSON and JavaScript, an excerpt from MS Link.  As other MS Azure offering the beauty of DocumentDB offering is the elasticity, it can be easily scale up or down, and it has built-in index support and it is schema-free.

CosmosDB – This can be termed as an advanced or next level of what DocumentDB has offered. Let us see what these offerings are.

Why to move to Azure CosmosDB?

Unlike DocumentDB offering and application like large internet-scale applications or sites, for example gaming industry or Social Media it can be very much useful. With the release of CosmosDB MS has offered and enhanced capabilities in areas like core database engine, distribution and elastic scalability. Below are the list of key capabilities offered by CosmosDB:

  1. Turnkey global distribution – Now one can distribute data to any number of Azure regions
  2. Multiple data models and popular APIs like DocumentDB API, MongoDB API, Table API, Gremlin API and ARS based data model
  3. Scale data storage and throughput
  4. End-to-end low latency
  5. Always on availability
  6. Schema free
  7. Automatic Index management

I hope this will help you understand basic difference and that why to move to Azure CosmosDB. In case it interest you here is a link that you can refer to for further study. You can also refer to articles in Cloud category if Azure or Cloud as an general is your interest area.

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Hemantgiri Goswami

Hemantgiri Goswami

Hemantgiri is a seasoned SQL Server Consultant with demonstrated history for close to 21 years. He is a published author specializing in High Availability and Disaster Recovery area. He was awarded Most Valuable Professional by Microsoft 4 times. He is a regular speaker at events in Surat. Hemantgiri is founder and leader of the SQLPASS Chapter for Surat.