What is Azure Cosmos DB?

Microsoft aims to help you better manage your data with services like Azure Cosmos DB, a multi-model database service that transparently scales and replicates your data wherever your users are. Let’s take a closer look at this PaaS offering and how you can benefit from it.

A Definition of Azure Cosmos DB

Comos DB is a database service that is globally distributed. It allows you to manage your data even if you keep them in data centers that are scattered throughout the world. It provides the tools you need to scale both global distribution pattern and computational resources, and these tools are provided by Microsoft Azure.

It can support multiple data models using one backend. This means that it can be used for document, key value, relational, and graph models. It is more or less a NoSQL database because it does not rely on any schemas. However, because it uses query language similar to SQL and can easily support ACID transactions, some people have been classifying it as a NewSQL type of database. What differentiates it from other NewSQL databases, however, is that it does not have a relational data model.

What Problem Azure Cosmos DB actually Solve?

Traditionally, it would take you a long time and a lot of tedious effort to build a similar globally distributed database that you would need to host on your own data centers, using your own connections and other resources. The planning in itself would deter most companies from even thinking about such a setup; many would think that it wouldn’t be worth the investment. What happens is that most companies would rather opt out of it than take advantage of the business and growth opportunities that such a database system can offer.

When cloud computing and platform-as-a-service came along, however, it became easier to come up with a globally distributed and scalable database for your company. So easy that it is possible for just one person to architect and manage it just with a few clicks of the mouse. Azure Cosmos DB takes it to the next level, giving you a turnkey database system that you can scale according to your needs.

It will definitely help any enterprise establish a flexible database that would help them meet their business needs. But it is especially useful for companies that are looking for a database system that is scalable and globally distributed. Globally distributed means that all resources are partitioned horizontally in every region of the world, as well as replicated across different geographical areas. That means latency is at a minimum, and your users have a faster, seamless experience.

Azure Cosmos DB offers 99.99% availability.

Additional Features

Users also get to reap the benefits of several other features including:

• Complete service and ready to use: It gives you a complete product that is powered by Azure and can be automatically replicated in data centers worldwide.
  
  

• Multi-API: Because data is indexed automatically, users can access it using any API of their choice. They can see their data using SQL, Gremlin, JavaScript, Azure Table Storage, and MongoDB.
  
  

• A number of consistency levels: It uses five different consistency levels: bounded staleness, strong, session, eventual, and consistent-prefix.
  
  

• Latency: Very low latency is practically guaranteed at less than 10 milliseconds when reading data and less than 15 milliseconds when writing data.

Benefits of Azure Cosmos DB

You will not only have an easier time creating and managing a database system that is located in different parts of the world, it is also scalable, reliable, and highly available.

You can now use MongoDB APIs to access your database, as well as SQL, Azure Tables, and Gremlin. This means you are 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, which is what Azure Cosmos DB is based on. The fact that it offers five consistency models is another plus. Most other database systems only offer two: eventual consistency and strong consistency.