AzureFunBytes is a weekly opportunity to learn more about the fundamentals and foundations that make up Azure. It’s a chance for me to understand more about what people across the Azure organization do and how they do it. Every week we get together at 11 AM Pacific on Microsoft LearnTV and learn more about Azure.

This week on AzureFunBytes join us to discuss what’s new with Azure Cosmos DB. Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed platform for NoSQL databases that works with most programming languages with multiple API’s for accessing and manipulating data. Choose from multiple database APIs including the native Core (SQL) API, API for MongoDB, Cassandra API, Gremlin API, and Table API. Build fast with open-source APIs, multiple SDKs, schemaless data, and no-ETL analytics over operational data. Azure Cosmos DB is a schema-less service that will automatically index your data regardless of the model you choose. Common use cases for Azure Cosmos DB include IoT, retail, marketing, gaming, web apps, mobile apps, social applications, and analytics.

Some of the big advantages of using Azure Cosmos DB include low latency and global availability with replication, multi-region writes, auto-scaling, and integration into other Azure Services (Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Key Vault, and more!) Backing the reliability of Azure Cosmos DB is an unbeatable SLA, 99.999% availability, and enterprise-level security for every application.

To help me understand more about Azure Cosmos DB, I’ll welcome Gahl Levy and Theo van Kray from the Cosmos DB product team. They will join me to provide updates on all the latest on Azure Cosmos DB and how it has support for its own native SQL API as well as other open-source APIs. The two most popular of these are Azure Cosmos DB’s MongoDB API and Cassandra API. In this episode, we will introduce viewers to these two API’s and talk about the benefits of using them. We will also talk about the latest updates and features as well as how to get started on migrating existing workloads to Azure Cosmos DB.

00:00:00 – Opening
00:02:26 – Welcome back to AzureFunBytes!
00:03:55 – Welcome Gahl and Theo!
00:06:01 – How did you get here, Theo?
00:07:40 – How did you get here, Gahl?
00:09:21 – Reviewing the different APIs for Azure Cosmos DB
00:13:36 – Common use cases
00:17:10 – More info on the API for MongoDB
00:23:32 – How long does it take to autoscale?
00:26:28 – How do I upgrade my database account to receive new features?
00:28:20 – Demo the API for MongoDB
00:30:46 – Now let’s learn about the Cassandra API for Azure Cosmos DB
00:35:09 – Cassandra MI vs API – how to choose?
00:37:38 – How to migrate your Cassandra workloads to Azure Cosmos DB
00:41:38 – Demo: Cassandra live migration
00:44:15 – Configuring Spark
00:54:56 – Reviewing the migrated data

About Gahl Levy

Gahl Levy is a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft with the Azure Cosmos DB Engineering team. Gahl has spent the last 8 years of his career working on database software and cloud infrastructure. He’s responsible for the API for MongoDB at Cosmos DB. Gahl earned an MBA with honors from UC Berkeley and a B.S. in Computer Science from UC Santa Cruz.

About Theo van Kray

Theo has previously worked as a Software Developer building business critical back-end ESB integrations and OLTP workloads for one of the largest insurers in the world. Shifting his focus and interests to analytics in 2016, Theo worked in the public sector as a Big Data Architect, and received his Masters in Data Science in 2017 from the University of Dundee, where he was awarded best research project for the academic year. Theo is passionate about NoSQL and distributed computing of all shapes and sizes, and quickly established himself as a Cosmos DB Product champion after joining Microsoft in 2017 as a Data Solution Architect. Theo now works in the Cosmos DB Engineering team as a Program Manager.

Learn about Azure fundamentals with me!

Live stream is normally found on Twitch, YouTube, and LearnTV at 11 AM PT / 2 PM ET Thursday. You can also find the recordings here as well:

AzureFunBytes on Twitch
AzureFunBytes on YouTube
Azure DevOps YouTube Channel
Follow AzureFunBytes on Twitter

Useful Docs:
Get $200 in free Azure Credit
Microsoft Learn: Introduction to Azure fundamentals
Microsoft Learn: Work with NoSQL data in Azure Cosmos DB
Azure Cosmos DB documentation
Common Azure Cosmos DB use cases
Try Azure Cosmos DB for free
Getting started with SQL queries
Azure Cosmos DB API for MongoDB
Introduction to the Azure Cosmos DB Cassandra API
Introduction to Gremlin API in Azure Cosmos DB
Introduction to Azure Cosmos DB: Table API
Tutorial: Use Data migration tool to migrate your data to Azure Cosmos DB