Change streams provide a real-time flow of database changes from your database to your application. This feature enables the development of reactive applications by allowing you to subscribe to database changes.

Configuring Change Streams

To get started with change streams, let’s look at an example code snippet that initiates a change stream on the exampleCollection collection. This script continuously monitors for any changes and prints the change event in JSON format.

// Open a change stream
const changeStream = db.exampleCollection.watch();

// Listen for changes
while (changeStream.hasNext()) {
    const change = changeStream.next();
    printjson(change);
}

Use-cases

• Real-time Analytics: Monitor and analyze data changes as they happen to provide up-to-date insights and dashboards.
• Event-Driven Architectures: Trigger actions or workflows in response to specific database changes, enabling reactive application development.
• Audit Logging: Keep track of all changes made to your database for compliance and security purposes.
• Monitoring and Alerts: Set up real-time alerts for specific changes or anomalies in your data, enhancing monitoring capabilities

Conclusion

Change streams provide a powerful way to monitor real-time database changes, enabling the development of highly responsive applications. Despite some limitations, the feature’s ability to push changes to your application as they happen can significantly streamline your data handling processes. Please follow the official documentation page for learning more.

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About Azure Cosmos DB

Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed and serverless distributed database for modern app development, with SLA-backed speed and availability, automatic and instant scalability, and support for open-source PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Apache Cassandra. Try Azure Cosmos DB for free here. To stay in the loop on Azure Cosmos DB updates, follow us on X, YouTube, and LinkedIn.