A Technical Overview of Azure Cosmos DB

Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft’s globally distributed and multi-model database service. It is also called Multi-model + multi-API. It also offers turnkey global distribution across any number of Azure regions by transparently scaling and also replicating your data wherever your users are.

Azure Cosmos DB allows you to use key-value, graph, and column-family and document data in one service. It allows you to access your Data, including SQL, JavaScript, Gremlin, MongoDB, and Table Storage. Azure Cosmos DB allows you to independently, and elastically scale storage and throughput at any time. It is built on highly responsive, mission-critical applications and developers to correctly write globally distributed applications and also support multiple data models and popular APIs for accessing data. It supports transparent multi-homing and guarantees 99.999% high availability. Azure is a Microsoft cloud database service which is based on SQL database technology. It offers five defined consistency levels: strong, bounded staleness, consistent-prefix, session and eventual—for an intuitive programming model with low latency and high availability for your planet-scale app. Azure Cosmos DB also provides a persistent, high concurrency, writeable graph database. The founder of Azure Cosmos DB is Dr. Leslie Lamport and it was developed by the Microsoft Corporation.

Key Features

Unique keys provide developers with the ability to add a layer of data integrity to their database. It prevents the creation of any new or updated items with values that duplicate values specified by the unique key constraint. These are supported by the latest version of the .NET and .NET Core SQL SDKs and the MongoDB API and table API and Graph API do not support unique keys at this time. Each unique key policy can have a maximum of 10 unique key constraints, and combinations for all unique index properties should not exceed 60 characters.

Azure cosmos APIS

SQL API

SQL API helps manage JSON data through well-defined database resources which offer a simple HTTP programming model for all resources.

Graph

Azure Cosmos DB Graph API accounts and graphs using the Azure portal and then uses the Gremlin Console from Apache TinkerPop to work with Graph API data.

MongoDB

MongoDB API provides you comprehensive support for MongoDB query language.

Uses of Azure Cosmos DB

Retail and Marketing

It is also used in the retail industry for storing catalog data and also for event sourcing in order to process pipelines. It is a fully managed service that serves as a system of registration and discovery for enterprise for entering price data sources.

Gaming

Modern games perform graphical processing on mobile/console clients but rely on the cloud to deliver customized and personalized content like in-game stats, social media integration, and high-score leaderboards.

Web and Mobile Applications

Azure Cosmos DB is commonly used in the web and mobile applications and is well suited for modeling social interactions, integrating with third-party services, and for building rich personalized experiences. The cosmos DB can be used to generate rich IOS and Android applications using the popular Xamarian Framework.

Social Applications

We use the social network to keep in touch with friends, family or sometimes, share our passions with others on social sites. A common use case for Azure Cosmos DB is to store and query user-generated content (UGC) for web, mobile and social media applications. Some examples of UGC are chat sessions, tweets, blog posts, ratings, and comments.

Advantages

Azure cosmos DB supports .NET, C#, JavaScript, MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages. It also supports APIs and other access methods DocumentDB AP, IGraph API (Gremlin), MongoDB, Restful HTTP API, Table API and also supports Server-Side Scripts like JavaScript.

DB API is no longer limited to just one platform and you gain all the tools that you need. You can also enjoy the features (including the tunable consistency levels) that you have adored with DocumentDB. Most other database systems only offer two: eventual consistency and strong consistency.

Cost of Azure Cosmos

Azure cosmos has highly-built availability without any extra configuration, cost, and replication. It has flexible pricing to choose resources for your workload with no hidden cost.