Azure Cosmos DB Overview

    1, What is Azure Cosmos Db?

Azure Cosmos Db is Microsoft's proprietary globally distributed, launched in May 2017.

This is a Cloud-based database. That means your database is built, deployed, and delivered through a cloud platform.

It is a NoSQL database. Your database could be stored in multi models-database, such as JSON documents store, Graph DBMS, Key-value store, and Wide column store, instead of columns and rows used by relational databases, such as SQL, Oracle, etc.

With Azure Cosmos Db,  which is highly responsive and always online, we can build an application with low latency and high availability, and get the response data in milliseconds.

    2, Why should we use it?

Azure Cosmos Db support multi-model database. 

You can store data in multiple ways, by using different APIs:

Azure Cosmos Db will save your life from building a multi-center data environment. 

If you want to build a large-scale globally distributed application, a multi-center data environment should be required, which will take a lot of time, but Cosmos DB has already supported it and will help you skip those steps. You only have to configure it to replicate your data to all of your targeted regions. 

Low latency. 

With 60+ announced regions, you can easily place the data closer to the users, then they can have the minimum latency.

Elastic Scale. 

Your cost is calculated by RU, which is calculated by 1 KB of data in 1 second. We can define max RU to manage throughput requirements and your money. 

When you set max RU = 1000 RU/s, if the throughput is over 1000 RU/s, an exception will be thrown. Cosmos DB starts rejecting the requests with 429 http status code then you can check your throughput, or update max RU in 2 ways: via the Azure portal or automatically via the Azure CLI.

Support to create social media applications. ⁽²⁾

Social media applications need to store User Generated Content (UGC), such as text, images, videos, comments, posts, tweets, etc. UGC is unstructured data, it is a combination of free-form text, relationships, tags, etc. UGC required different and dynamic structures, that's why they cannot be stored in relational databases, which have fixed schema. But NoSQL database, schema-free, can do it. Easy to search content with Azure Cognitive Search - a cloud search service. Azure Cognitive Search provides APIs, and tools for building a search engine within a few minutes. Graph database with gremlin API is the best for sorting social media followers.

Cost. 

100 RU/s will cost £8.71 per month, a very cheap price for a global data center when compared with planning a multi-center data. 

So imagine that you have a global data center, and in order to support your applications smoothly, you have to spend plenty of money and time. That’s why we can say: 100 RU/s will cost £8.71 per month is too cheap

On the other hand, we can try CosmosDb for free.

You can try this link to download: Install and develop locally with Azure Cosmos DB Emulator | Microsoft Learn

Step by step instructions to install:

You have to accept the license term

Install - Agree

then, installing

Installing

finish

Install - Finish

After installing, you can go to this Azure Cosmos Db Emulator shortcut to open the emulator

Emulator - Shortcut

After opening, you will get the notification at the corner of the screen

Emulator - Starting

and here is the notification when Azure Cosmos Emulator started

Emulator - Started

Here is the UI:

UI - Web - Url

Yes, we got the Web UI, 

with default URL is LOCAL-Azure Cosmos DB Emulator

In the web UI, we can try a sample at 1 

UI - 1

or learn more by reading document at 2

UI - 2

here is the explorer

UI - Explorer

the query UI

UI - Query

the result

UI - Result

you also have a minimap (code outline)

UI - Minimap

    3, Behind the scenes

Case sensitive and only order by 1 column at default search

Quite expensive if we only have a small or medium system

The migration of data from on-premises to cloud may take some time

Be careful when using partitioning. Every partition has to have PartitionKey. Microsoft guarantees that all the documents with the same PartitionKey are stored in the same Logical Partition. The maximum size of a logical partition (and consequently a physical partition) could not exceed 20 GB. We should choose the correct PartitionKey to make sure that every logical partition cannot exceed 20 GB.

    4, When should we use it?

Transactional volumes have many thousands of transactions per second

You will get some challenges: concurrency, latency, and availability

Distributed databases are the solution, but maintenance can still be a costly and time-consuming exercise.

Azure CosmosDb will handle these challenges. It will be deployed worldwide across all Azure regions. Cloud-based will provide minimum latency and high availability

Database contain many parent-child relationships

In this case, document-oriented databases are much better with object-oriented approaches, and Azure CosmosDb provides NoSQL document database.

Your system is complex networks and relationships

Relational databases present a less-than-optimal solution. Because relationships between entities do not actually exist in a relational database.

Graph database engines could be considered a re-emergence of the network database paradigm, and Azure CosmosDb has Azure CosmosDb for Gremlin.

When you want to build social media applications

    5, Azure Cosmos Database vs SQL Server

(1):

Hierarchical Data- Relation and CosmosDb

     Price

Price-Cosmos

Azure CosmosDb Price with Region = East US and currency = USD

Price-SQL

 Resources

1. Demo source code: Not available for this article

References

• Introduction - Azure Cosmos DB | Microsoft Learn
• Azure Cosmos DB - NoSQL and Relational Database
• System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Microsoft SQL Server
• Pricing - Azure Cosmos DB | Microsoft Azure
• SQL Server 2019—Pricing | Microsoft
• Three Benefits of Azure Cosmos DB | Striim
• Lesson learned after 2 years working with Cosmos DB