Azure DocumentDB is a documentary database service and as like its name suggests, it is aMicrosoft Azure Cloud service.

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Since the last summer, developers have access to this new service, and now it is available for all.
The Redmond Company offers for the first time a “NoSQL” database.
This is not the only service that has come; it is associated to Azure Search, a full text search service.

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Why NoSQL?

Is first and foremost a young market, which still has the wind in their sails and today we have not necessarily a technology leader.
It is also a technology involved in some famous websites like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Amazon.

There are many advantages but to simplify it is to manage big, not huge or enormous amount of data quite simply.
According to a 2010’s survey, 44% of IT professionals do not know and have never heard of NoSQL.
Times are changing in a few years and now traditional DBMS publishers offer this new feature.

To whom Microsoft does it compete?

The most well known and most commonly used is MongoDB, but we find many on the DBMS market: Cassandra,VoldemortCouchDB and SimpleDB for example. You can notice that Oracle also has an “Oracle NoSQL” here.

What are the technological attractions for DocumentDB?

First of all, it is free of any schema and supports natively JavaScript and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) languages. JSON is used to represent structured information like the XML format.

Microsoft also highlighted that it is the ideal choice for web application and especially mobile applications.
There is also a range of tools available in SDK format for Java, Node.js, Python, JavaScript and .NET:

It can perform the four basic operations for data persistence: CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete)
Through a RESTful HTTP interface (service-oriented architectures for communication between machines) in Javascript, it also allows queries and treatments.
According to Microsoft documentation, DocumentDB is on a fast SSD structure with low-latency and is optimized for writing.
An example of usage is the platform MSDN, which is already using DocumentDB in production.

How does it work?

In fact, it is simple…
The first step is the most logical: connect to the Azure portal and be guided.

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In the documentation tab, there is the “getting started” of the tool and “Create your first application” in ASP.Net, Node.js, Java or Python.

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Et voilà, it starts with a few clicks. The article is not to describe the whole creation process so I’ll leave it there for at least to arouse your interest and curiosity.

What are the prices?

There are different DocumentDB service offerings according to the performance that you will:

  • S1 with 250 requests per second to 0.031 CHF / hour (~ 23 CHF / month)
  • S2 with 1000 requests per second to 0.061 CHF / hour (~ 46 CHF / month)
  • S3 with 2,500 requests per second to 0.221 CHF / hour (~ 91 CHF / month)

The Azure DocumentDB force is also to be able to dynamically change the level of commitment to performance and of course also an SLA with a 99.95% connections availability.
For more information on pricing, I encourage you to go to the Microsoft Azure Cloud Website here

The funny Bonus

To finish my article, I want just to tell you that there is a small panel of pleasant scenarios like data analysis with Hadoop or create a mobile app.

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I hope this article has encouraged your curiosity to see this novelty or at least allows you to discover DocumentDB.