Over the years I’ve kept you up to date not only with the latest news and features in SQL Server, but with the entire Microsoft Data Platform, both on premise and in the cloud. This includes additional products such as SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and their cloud siblings Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Data Factory (ADF). Another important and powerful sibling product is Azure Cosmos DB, formerly known as Document DB, which I first wrote about here many years ago.
What is Cosmos DB?
Azure Cosmos DB is a global NoSQL data management system that offers fast read and write speeds with automatic scaling, high availability and very flexible options for consistency, availability and partitionability. While Cosmos DB is its own data management platform, you can use it to emulate or even directly replace popular NoSQL alternatives such as MongoDB or Cassandra. Cosmos DB also offers a variety of data models for storing data and APIs so that you can access your data as if it were SQL, Cassandra, MongoDB, Gremlin, Spark etc. or Table (from that of Cassandra and HBase).
I like how my colleague and colleague DBTA The author Guy Harrison describes Cosmos DB (https://bit.ly/2WdCWTn):
“The heart of Cosmos DB is a geodistributed and replicated database. Data is stored in containers that can be distributed across regions. The system can dynamically adjust the partitioning to optimize throughput. The partitioning can also be optimized to enable geographical optimization: Europe-specific data, for example, can mainly be stored in European data centers. Cosmos DB offers uniquely configurable options for consistency models, data models, and APIs. “
New features every month
Like many Microsoft Azure products, Cosmos DB has a quick release calendar with many new features and capabilities that are released regularly. For example, in January the team released new APIs to support MongoDB Server version 3.6, as well as a new Autopilot feature (in preview) that can automatically manage and elastically scale the Requirement Units (RUs) consumed by your instance of Cosmos DB. In February, the team introduced the new SDK 2.2.2 version of the SQL API that supports Spring Data and contains new diagnostic information such as the RequestCharge API with better handling for user requests (https://bit.ly/). 3cVkQuY).
Announcing the new free tier for Azure Cosmos DB
The new free tier for Azure Cosmos DB offers new accounts 400 RUs and 5 GB of free space per month. That’s roughly the equivalent of $ 25 a month for free services. If you’ve built apps on Cosmos DB that run on fewer than 400 RUs and 5GB of storage, you don’t have to pay anything. Conversely, if you know that your application is exceeding this usage, you can apply the discount as soon as you consume more than these resources.
For users who need many collections (up to 25), you can now run them in a shared throughput dataset where they all share the free 400 RUs / month, so apps that previously cost a number of RUs could now be run for free with the new free tier. Just because this offer is “free” does not reduce your value to you. The free tier still includes the same 99.99% availability and read / write latency of <10ms that is normal for all Cosmos DB accounts. However, Microsoft does not offer an SLA for the free level of resources consumed. You can have up to one free tier per Azure subscription per Azure Cosmos DB account.
Note that when you create a database or container that is replicated in multiple regions, the amount of RUs consumed is multiplied by the number of regions. So if you have a Cosmos DB database with three regions and you are using 150 RUs per month, that actually adds up to 450 RUs in all three regions, exceeding the free tier limits. However, you will be billed for only 50 RUs (450 RUs used – 400 RUs free = 50 RUs billed).
Getting started
First, create a new Azure Cosmos DB account (https://aka.ms/create-cosmos-account) and then activate the free tier (https://aka.ms/cosmos-free-tier) during account creation . Note that you are limited to one free tier account per Azure subscription. Check out the Microsoft quickstarts
and tutorials (https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db) for traditional teaching. Or try a sample Azure notebook (https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db/create-notebook-visualize-data) to see what you can do with Azure Cosmos DB right away .
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