Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB v5 now in limited preview!

Shweta Nayak

We are excited to announce that the Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB v5 is now in Limited Preview! The latest v5 Preview version supports much anticipated features such as distributed ACID transactions, higher limits for unsharded collections and for shards themselves, improved performance for aggregation pipelines and complex queries, and more.

Learn more below about how you can request access today to try out and learn more about this Limited Preview!

Distributed transactions allow ACID guarantees cross shards and collections:

Transactions enable you to group together dependent operations and treat them as one operation, while respecting all ACID semantics. With this preview, we introduce support for distributed transactions, extending the multi-document ACID transaction guarantees to sharded clusters. Distributed transactions allow you to use transactions across multiple operations, collections, databases, documents, and shards. You can use distributed transactions to address complex use cases in your application by enforcing transactional guarantees across highly scalable, cloud-native datasets.

Higher limits for unsharded collections and shard sizes improve flexibility:

The v5 preview no longer imposes a 20 GB limit on the fixed (unsharded) collections. This allows you to leave bigger MongoDB collections in your workload unsharded. You may choose to turn on sharding in the future, using the sh.shardCollection() method. Sharded collections now support bigger shard sizes too. Currently, the new limit for shard sizes is well into the hundreds of GBs and will continue to grow. These higher limits for unsharded collections and shard sizes, as well as the option to turn on sharding later, allow for more flexibility while configuring and managing your workloads on Azure Cosmos DB.

Improved performance for aggregation pipelines and complex queries; and more:

We have also made platform changes to make aggregation pipelines and complex queries run faster and more efficiently, so you can run all types of operations seamlessly.

Additionally, we offer full support for Decimal128 data type, support for PCRE features in a regular expression as well as the ability to rename a collection with the db.collection.renameCollection() command.

How can I sign up to try out this Limited Preview?

We are currently opening this Preview version to a limited set of customers. To be approved, you’ll need:

1. A non-disclosure agreement (NDA) with Microsoft (You can sign a new NDA, but if you’re based outside the USA you will not be able to participate in the preview at this time)
2. Intention to develop a new workload or migrate an existing workload

You can apply to the Limited Preview in the Preview Features area of the Azure Portal.

1. Go to the Preview Features area in your Azure subscription.
2. Under Type, select “Microsoft.DocumentDB”.
3. Click on the feature “Cosmos DB for MongoDB v5” in the list of available preview features.
4. Click the Register button at the bottom of the page to join the preview.

Please expect a response with the next steps and details within two weeks of signing up for the preview. We will be using the email address used to sign-up to communicate with you.

Workloads onboarded to the Preview will receive updates with newer capabilities, as and when they are available! Being an early adopter of this Preview, you will get access to new capabilities before others, and you’ll be able to share early feedback with us.

If you are new to Azure Cosmos DB or want to know why you should consider trying out this preview, here’s an introduction to the API for MongoDB and its benefits.

Shweta Nayak Senior Program Manager, Azure Cosmos DB

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