Azure Cosmos DB Blog
The latest news, updates and technical insights from the Azure Cosmos DB team
Featured posts
Azure Cosmos DB Conf 2025: Learn, Build, and Connect with the Community
Join us for the 5th annual Azure Cosmos DB Conf, a free virtual developer event co-hosted by Microsoft and the Azure Cosmos DB community. This is your oppor...
Latest posts
Announcing Data API builder for Azure Cosmos DB
We are super excited to announce the public preview of Data API builder. A new feature that allows customers to instantly and securely build a GraphQL API for Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL and Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL.  A quick look at Data API Builder With Data API Builder, database objects can be exposed via REST or GraphQL endpoints so your data can be accessed on any platform, any language, and any device. Support for Azure SQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL and Azure Cosmos DB provides API developers with an efficiency boost never seen before. Developers can quickly build GraphQL and REST APIS by s...
Enabling real-time dashboards: Power BI DirectQuery mode and Dataflows support in Azure Cosmos DB
The Azure Cosmos DB V2 Connector for Power BI, with support for querying the Azure Cosmos DB transactional store in both DirectQuery and Import modes, is now in preview. The new V2 connector also supports Azure Cosmos DB as a data source in Power BI dataflows. It’s available now on Power BI components including Desktop, Power BI service, Power BI Mobile and on the Power Query platform. Real-time reporting without importing data The DirectQuery mode enables queries pushdown, including aggregations to the Azure Cosmos DB container, when a filter on partition key is specified. This new capability unlocks real time...
Azure Cosmos DB – for startups too
Azure Cosmos DB is a fully-managed, distributed database known for its automatic and instant scalability, guaranteed business continuity with SLA-backed availability, and security for applications of any size or scale. While these are enterprise-level capabilities – ensuring that the most business-critical apps have the guaranteed performance and uptime they need – they are not reserved only for enterprises. Startups too are tapping into Azure Cosmos DB capabilities to help them grow and innovate while keeping costs low.  That’s the topic of a new white paper by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), ...
Save the Date for Azure Cosmos DB Conf 2023!
Overview Save the date and get ready for Azure Cosmos DB Conf 2023! 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. During the event, you'll learn about the latest innovations in Azure Cosmos DB, a fully managed and serverless distributed database supporting both NoSQL and relational data. Our expert speakers will share their knowledge and experience, providing insights into best practices for building cloud-native applications that scale to meet the demands of modern business. ...
Latest NoSQL Java Ecosystem Updates 2022 Q3 & Q4
We're always busy adding new features, fixes, patches, and improvements to our Java-based client libraries for Azure Cosmos DB API for NoSQL. In this regular blog series we'll share highlights of recent updates in the last period. July - December 2022 updates Spark 3.3 support Cloud-native hybrid transactional and analytical processing (HTAP) is supported in Azure Cosmos DB through Synapse link, using OLTP and OLAP Spark connectors, which now support Spark 3.3 as of December 2022. Improved Cosmos DB Live Migration in Spark Connector During Nov...
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...