Azure DocumentDB, Microsoft’s NoSQL cloud database service is now generally available.
Announced in August 2014, DocumentDB is a fully managed, schema-less, SSD-backed database that stores JSON documents and exposes a REST API. The JSON documents can be queried using a lightweight SQL syntax that recognizes native JavaScript constructs like objects and arrays.
In an official blog post, Microsoft’s John Macintyre said:
We built DocumentDB in response to the increasing demands of mobile first, cloud first application development. NoSQL databases are becoming the tool of choice for many developers however running and managing these databases can be complicated and costly, especially at scale. DocumentDB is delivered as a fully managed database-as-a-service (DBaaS) with built in high availability, SQL query over indexed JSON and multi-document transaction processing.
DocumentDB is available in 3 performance levels - S1, S2, S3. Each level comes with provisioned document storage and reserved throughput measured in request units. Performance levels provide a guaranteed, reserved level of throughput and request processing over high performance SSD based storage. Standard tier database accounts are billed for a minimum of one S1 unit. Customers can dynamically change performance levels. For example, after creating a S1 collection, they can scale up to S3, then scale down to S2. Each DocumentDB database account can have multiple databases with multiple collections.
Microsoft has also announced an open source migration tool to import data from JSON files, CSV files, SQL Server, MongoDB and existing DocumentDB collections. The tool also supports transforming tabular data sources such as SQL Server or CSV files while retaining the hierarchical relationships. The migration tool’s source code may be accessed from Github, and the compiled binary is available at Microsoft Download Center.
SGS International Inc., an agency that specializes in design-to-print graphic services is an early adopter of Azure DocumentDB. Shane Davis, senior director at SGS International said:
InkLab is highly responsive because DocumentDB provides faster access to data … We also used it to avoid design compromises that we would have had with a structured-data solution.
DocumentDB comes with SDKs for popular languages including Net, Node, Java and Python. It is integrated with Azure HDInsight and Azure Search.