Azure Cosmos DB Blog
The latest news, updates and technical insights from the Azure Cosmos DB team
Featured posts
Join the Conversation: Call for Proposals for Azure Cosmos DB Conf 2025!
Are you passionate about Azure Cosmos DB? Do you have insights, experiences, or innovations that the developer community would love to hear? Now is your cha...
Latest posts
Performance Improvements in Azure Cosmos DB Kafka Connector
Overview Azure Cosmos DB Kafka connector had been updated recently and several new features were delivered as part of the v1.6.0 release based on the feedback and requirements of several customers implementing it as part of their application modernization journey. In this blog post – I will share details about those improvements and introduce you to the new connector features and use cases they are targeted to solve. Azure Cosmos DB Kafka Sink and Source connector were released in 2021 and are available for both open-source Kafka deployments as well as part of Confluent Cloud to help simplify data streaming...
Azure Cosmos DB & Power BI Incremental Refresh
Abstract Data Collection has become a daunting task with the ever-growing amount of data. The growth of data makes reporting tasks an operational challenge due to the processing time requirements imposed by technical limitations in many business intelligence tools. The paper outlines the incremental refresh capability of Microsoft’s Power BI and its impact on analytics processing and reporting. Scenario Overview In this blog post, we want to document a customer engagement we worked on where we learned about a unique feature in Power BI that can be used when using Azure Cosmos DB’s SQL API. The result of ...
NoSQL vs. relational: Which database should you use for your app?
Microsoft recently announced the introduction of Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL, a distributed relational database, making Azure the first cloud platform to offer support for both relational and NoSQL (non-relational) data in a single database service. This means Azure Cosmos DB developers now have ultimate flexibility when building cloud-native apps: with using Azure Cosmos DB’s own NoSQL database as well as others like MongoDB and Apache Cassandra, or with relational data using increasingly popular PostgreSQL tools and extensions. Which one would you choose for your app? Traditionally, the answer has been si...
Building and deploying Java apps with Spring Cloud and Azure Cosmos DB
On a recent episode of Azure Cosmos DB Live TV, I discussed building Java apps with Azure Cosmos DB and Spring Cloud. The focus of the discussion was how to use Spring Cloud Azure, an open-source project that provides seamless Spring integration with Azure services and gives developers a Spring-idiomatic way to connect and consume Azure services, with only a few lines of configuration and minimal code changes. Each starter project in Spring Cloud Azure includes all the dependencies and transitive dependencies needed to begin application development with Azure services. For example, if you want to get started u...
Azure Cosmos DB API for NoSQL – The Java Ecosystem
The largest external customers of Azure Cosmos DB API for NoSQL, running some of the biggest and most mission critical workloads in Azure, are primarily Java users! In this blog we'll give you a quick run-down of all our supported Java-based client libraries, including our battle-tested core Java SDK, its key supported features, and where to go to find out more! The Spring Data Client Library Built on top of the Java SDK, the Azure Cosmos DB Spring Data Client Library allows developers to build Java applications more rapidly on Azure Cosmos DB using Spring Boot, one of the most popular application developmen...
Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB v5 now in limited preview!
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 trea...
The Azure Cosmos DB Conf call for speakers is now open!
Azure Cosmos DB Conf is back for 2023 and the call for papers is now open! Azure Cosmos DB Conf is a free virtual developer event happening on March 28th, 2023, organized by Microsoft with support from the greater Azure Cosmos DB community. This is the third year we’re holding the conference, with sessions delivered by both Microsoft employees and experts from the Azure Cosmos DB community.. We invite you to join this event, learn more about Azure Cosmos DB, and see what others in the community are building. The event will be streamed in a one-day, 3-hour live show with additional on-demand sessions. We ...
Under the hood of the new Azure Functions extension for Azure Cosmos DB
The Azure Cosmos DB Azure Functions extension version 4 is now GA, and it packs a load of improvements and new features. The goal of this post is to go deep into the technical details about the extension changes and guide you to take advantage of them. Source code As a starting point, everything I'll be talking about in the article is available on the GitHub repository where the extension source code is developed. That is the best place to post and share your feedback. The following sections will point to the source code as reference for those curious on how each feature works. Managed identity authentication ...
AltGraph – Graph workloads with Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL
AltGraph is the idea of implementing “graph workloads” not with a graph database, but with the more general-purpose Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL (formerly known as the “SQL API”). Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL is highly performant and offers the best integration with the rest of Azure. It also offers the lowest learning curve since most of the industry already understands SQL (Structured Query Language), the query language used by this database. AltGraph was the topic of episode #59 of Azure Cosmos DB Live TV, and has since been expanded to include the v2 IMDb graph. Perception Many customers I speak wi...