If you play Halo 5, then DocumentDB has already come into your life!
You may have heard that Azure DocumentDB has made some new exciting developments, based on industry, customer and user feedback.
Let’s have a look at the biggest news: DocumentDB now has protocol support for MongoDB. From the industry perspective, this is great news. MongoDB is one of the most easily-recognised NoSQLs databases. Now that DocumentDB can be a great supporting act for MongoDB, it means that architects have a broader range of tools to support business needs in the enterprise data architecture, whilst increasing business capability using the Azure cloud. How does it work? Well, or MongoDB at the wire protocol level, which means that the existing MongoDB drivers will function against DocumentDB. For IT departments, it means that enterprises can persist data in DocumentDB behind the scenes. With it, it brings the reliability, stability and resilience of the Azure cloud. It also means that these technologies are accessible for small to medium enterprises in a way that they can afford, backed up with the stability and support from Microsoft Azure that they may find difficult to service on their own.
How will it work in practice? If organisations already have written a MongoDB application, then they could put the data into the Azure DocumentDB data store because the APIs are supported. This means that the DocumentDB team hasn’t created new APIs but now they support existing ones, so it means you can re-use what you already have and know.
How does an organisation get started? If their applications use MongoDB to create, read, update and delete documents, as well as query over those documents, then they can leverage the same patterns and code to communicate with DocumentDB. Start by requesting access to this preview functionality by following these instructions.
In a further step to meet the demands of small to medium enterprises, the pricing model for DocumentDB has been decoupled from throughput, although the throughput is still reserved. Instead, DocumentDB has moved towards a consumption model, which is easier for people to understand. Further, it also brings it in line with other Microsoft technologies.
Another feature that will please the technologists is server-side sharding for DocumentDB with the introduction of partitioned collections. Briefly, when the user creates a collection, there will be a partition collection which has a key. Based on this key, DocumentDB will automatically shard behind the scenes. This will make DocumentDB more accessible by increasing its user-friendliness; after all, it is a relatively new technology. This is particularly applicable in the Internet of Things scenario, where the organisation could be logging a lot of data in a very short period of time. The ability to conduct server-side sharding is critical to support these scenarios, and it is great news to see it happen for DocumentDB.
To summarise, DocumentDB has produced some great new features for architects and developers alike, with the needs of the organisation in mind. In particular, it’s great to see the applicability of the changes to organisations of different sizes; the small to medium ambitious and data-savvy business, as well as larger organisations. To learn more, head on over to Channel 9 to catch a great BUILD session on this topic.
https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2016/B840/player
Great stuff!