Azure Cosmos DB Blog
The latest news, updates and technical insights from the Azure Cosmos DB team
Latest posts
IntelliJ support for Azure Cosmos DB!
We're excited to announce that the Azure ToolKit for IntelliJ plugin now includes support for Azure Cosmos DB! IntelliJ IDEA is an integrated development environment (IDE) for Java, Kotlin, Groovy, and other JVM-based languages. The Azure plugin allows Java developers to easily develop, configure, test, and deploy highly available and scalable Java cloud-native web apps in Azure. With the latest release of the plugin, Java developers can now view any Azure Cosmos DB account, database, or container from the resource explorer... Users of IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate edition can also introspect collections and ...
Antipatterns on Azure Cosmos DB
This post was authored by Microsoft MVP and Azure Cosmos DB community champion Blaize Stewart. You can reach Blaize (@theonemule) on Twitter. Software developers of all kinds love patterns. They give us reusable ideas that can be applied in many different contexts. We also have antipatterns: bad practices and habits that crop up enough to become patterns but should be avoided. Developing with Azure Cosmos DB is no exception. Over the last few years, I have encountered many different problems in working with folks on Azure Cosmos DB. I am not exactly sure why these have been so common, but I suspect it may...
Load and visualize Covid-19 case data with the integrated Power BI experience
How have major cities like London and New York been affected by Covid-19 and how can we use historical data to explore how these effects might impact us in a post-Covid world? This was the question posed at a Microsoft Data + AI Hackathon held in partnership with the University of Oxford and Observable HQ at the New York City Reactor Meetup space this July. Attendees were encouraged to develop new insights based on the following criteria: These guidelines provided an opportunity to work with Microsoft data and AI services to develop strategies that involve using a combination of cloud...
Announcing Materialized Views for Azure Cosmos DB API for Cassandra Preview
Data modeling in the NoSQL world is driven by data access patterns. There are scenarios where it makes sense to duplicate data into multiple separate tables depending on the read/write pattern. This is even more important when you want to access the same information using different unique identifiers (not restricted to only the primary key). Writing to multiple tables in the same transaction or flow brings in a lot of overhead. The application needs to do heavy lifting to keep the data consistent across all the tables. Trying to do this using a secondary index and not specifying a primary key is not optimal fo...
Announcing General Availability of Azure Cosmos DB integrated cache
Reduce costs and latency for read-heavy workloads with Azure Cosmos DB integrated cache, an in-memory cache that’s now generally available. In addition to increasing speed and decreasing costs, adding an integrated cache simplifies your architecture and application complexity, allowing you to focus on building your business logic. The integrated cache is built into the Azure Cosmos DB dedicated gateway and can be utilized with minimal changes to your application. This allows you to get all the benefits of a traditional cache without any of the application overhead. Save costs on database reads Integ...
Intra-account container copy jobs for Core (SQL) and Cassandra API accounts (Preview)
Announcing the preview for Intra-account container copy jobs. This functionality helps create offline copies of containers for Azure Cosmos DB for both Core (SQL) API and Cassandra API using Azure CLI. When to use The container copy feature for Azure Cosmos DB is helpful for the following scenarios: Steps to use intra-account container copy Here are the steps to use intra-account container copy with an example. In this example we will copy data from ‘container1’ to ‘container2’ for a Core (SQL) API account named, ‘contoso-container-copydemo’. In this scenario we're migrating fro...
Write a Python data layer with Azure Cosmos DB and FastAPI
In this article, we will demonstrate how to build a data layer in Python for Azure Cosmos DB using FastAPI, a web framework for building and testing Python APIs. To demonstrate this, we will leverage the To Do App Quickstart in our docs. This app shows simple CRUD operations (insert, update, list and delete) using a simple data model for a To-Do item consisting of id, name, description, and isComplete fields. The application that we will create, will wrap these CRUD operations and expose them through a set of custom APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) using the FastAPI routing feature. We will then test ou...
Azure Cosmos DB SQL Studio is a Hidden Gem!
This post was authored by Microsoft MVP and Azure Cosmos DB community champion Hasan Savran. You can reach Hasan (@SavranWeb) on Twitter. Azure Cosmos DB Core (SQL) API has many features that can help you with your cloud projects in Microsoft Azure. Most of these features; especially the new ones are at the SDK level, and you need to know .NET or Java language to access them. I developed the extension for all levels of users within the Azure Cosmos DB community. It is a user-friendly, free tool that is not browser-based and doesn’t require you to know C# or Java to interact with Azure Cosmos DB. Azure Co...
Explore Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra’s new features
At Microsoft Ignite last November, we announced the general availability of Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra, an Azure service that hosts open-source Apache Cassandra clusters, with automated deployment, scaling, and management operations all built into the service. In this blog, we give a quick recap of what this service has to offer (check out the short video below, too) and share new preview features. "Managed Cassandra is fantastic. Its optimized for performance at large scale, drastically reduced maintenance overhead while improved security posture and sustainable. Forging a great partnership wit...