A Cosmonaut’s guide to the latest Azure Cosmos DB announcements
At Microsoft Build 2019 we announced exciting new capabilities, including the introduction of real-time operational analytics using new built in support for Apache Spark and a new Jupyter notebook experience for all Azure Cosmos DB APIs. We believe these capabilities will help our customers easily build globally distributed apps at Cosmos scale.
Here are additional enhancements to the developer experience, announced at Microsoft Build:
Powering Kubernetes with etcd API
Etcd is at the heart of the Kubernetes cluster – it’s where all of the state is! We are happy to announce a preview for wire-protocol compatible etcd API to enable self-managed Kubernetes developers to focus more on their apps, rather than managing etcd clusters. With the wire-protocol compatible Azure Cosmos DB API for etcd, Kubernetes developers will automatically get highly scalable, globally distributed, and highly available Kubernetes clusters. This enables developers to scale Kubernetes coordination and state management data on a fully managed service with 99.999-percent high availability and elastic scalability backed by Azure Cosmos DB SLAs. This helps significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and remove the hassle and complexity of managing etcd clusters.
To get started, setup AKS Engine with Azure Cosmos DB API for etcd. You can also learn more and sign-up for the preview.
Deepening our multi-model capabilities
The multi-model capabilities of Azure Cosmos DB’s database engine are foundational and bring important benefits to our customers, such as leveraging multiple data models in the same apps, streamlining development by focusing on the single service, reducing TCO by not having multiple database engines to manage, and getting the benefits of the comprehensive SLAs offered by Azure Cosmos DB.
Over the past two years, we have been steadily revamping our database engine’s type system and the storage encodings for both Azure Cosmos DB database log and index. The database engine’s type system is fully extensible and is now a complete superset of the native type systems of Apache Cassandra, MongoDB, Apache Gremlin, and SQL. The new encoding scheme for the database log is highly optimized for storage and parsing, and is capable of efficiently translating popular formats like Parquet, protobuf, JSON, BSON, and other encodings. The newly revamped index layout provides:
- Significant performance boost to query execution cost, especially for the aggregate queries
- New SQL query capabilities:
- Support for OFFSET/LIMIT and DISTINCT keywords
- Composite indexes for multi-column sorting
- Correlated subqueries including EXISTS and ARRAY expressions
Learn more about SQL query examples and SQL language reference.
The type system and storage encodings have provided benefits to a plethora of Gremlin, MongoDB, and Cassandra (CQL) features. We are now near full compatibility with Cassandra CQL v4, and are bringing native change feed capabilities as an extension command in CQL. Customers can build efficient, event sourcing patterns on top of Cassandra tables in Azure Cosmos DB. We are also announcing several Gremlin API enhancements, including the support of Execution Profile function for performance evaluation and String comparison functions aligned with the Apache TinkerPop specification.
To learn more, visit our documentation for Gremlin API Execution Profile and Azure Cosmos DB Gremlin API supported features.
SDK updates
General availability of Azure Cosmos DB .NET V3 SDK
- Fully open-sourced, .NET Standard 2.0 compatible
- ~30 percent performance improvements including the new streaming API
- More intuitive, idiomatic programming model with developer-friendly APIs
- New change feed pull and push programming models
We will make .NET SDK V3 generally available later this month and recommend existing apps upgrade to take advantage of the latest improvements.
New and improved Azure Cosmos DB Java V3 SDK
- New, reactor-based async programming model
- Added support for Azure Cosmos DB direct HTTPS and TCP transport protocols, increasing performance and availability
- All new query improvements of V3 SDKs
Java V3 SDK is fully open-sourced, and we welcome your contributions. We will make Java V3 SDK generally available shortly.
Change feed processor for Java
One of the most popular features in Azure Cosmos DB, change feed allows customers to programmatically observe changes to their data in Cosmos containers. It is used in many application patterns, including reactive programming, analytics, event store, and serverless. We’re excited to announce change feed processor library for Java, allowing you to build distributed microservices architectures on top of change feed, and dynamically scale them using one of the most popular programming languages.
General availability of the cross-platform Table .NET Standard SDK
The 1.0.1 GA version of the cross-platform Table .NET Standard SDK has just come out. It is a single unified cross-platform SDK for both Azure Cosmos DB Table API and Azure Storage Table Service. Our customers can now operate against the Table service, either as a Cosmos Table, or Azure Storage Table using .NET Framework app on Windows, or .NET Core app on multiple platforms. We’ve improved the development experience by removing unnecessary binary dependencies while retaining the improvements when invoking Table API via the REST protocols, such as using modern HttpClient, DelegatingHandler based extensibility, and modern asynchronous patterns. It can also be used by the cross-platform Azure PowerShell to continue to power the Table API cmdlets.
More cosmic developer goodness
ARM support for databases, containers, and other resources in Azure Resource Manager
Azure Cosmos DB now provides support for Databases, Containers and Offers in Azure Resource Manager. Users can now provision databases and containers, and set throughput using Azure Resource Manager templates or PowerShell. This support is available across all APIs including SQL (Core), MongoDB, Cassandra, Gremlin, and Table. This capability also allows customers to create custom RBAC roles to create, delete, or modify the settings on databases and containers in Azure Cosmos DB. To learn more and to get started, see Azure Cosmos DB Azure Resource Manager templates.
Azure Cosmos DB custom roles and policies
Azure Cosmos DB provides support for custom roles and policies. Today, we announce the general availability of an Azure Cosmos DB Operator role. This role provides the ability to manage Azure Resource Manager resources for Azure Cosmos DB without providing data access. This role is intended for scenarios where customers need the ability to grant access to Azure Active Directory Service Principals to manage deployment operations for Azure Cosmos DB, including the account, databases, and containers. To learn more, visit our documentation on Azure Cosmos DB custom roles and policies support.
Upgrade single-region writes Cosmos accounts to multi-region writes
One of the most frequent customer asks has been the ability to upgrade existing Cosmos accounts configured with a single writable region (single-master) to multiple writable regions (multi-master). We are happy to announce that starting today, you will be able to make your existing accounts writable from all regions. You can do so using the Azure portal or Azure CLI. The upgrade is completely seamless and is performed without any downtime. To learn more about how to perform this upgrade, visit our documentation.
Automatic upgrade of fixed containers to unlimited containers
All existing fixed Azure Cosmos containers (collections, tables, graphs) in the Azure Cosmos DB service are now automatically upgraded to enjoy unlimited scale and storage. Please refer to this documentation for in depth overview of how to scale your existing fixed containers to unlimited containers.
Azure Cosmos Explorer now with Azure AD support
Enjoy a flexible Cosmos Explorer experience to work with data within the Azure portal, as part of the Azure Cosmos DB emulator and Azure Storage Explorer. We’ve also made it available “full-screen”, for when developers do not have access to the Azure portal or need a full screen experience. Today, we are adding support for Azure Active Directory to https://cosmos.azure.com, so that developers can authenticate directly with their Azure credentials, and take advantage of the full screen experience.
Azure portal and tools enhancements
To help customers correctly provision capacity for apps and optimize costs on Azure Cosmos DB, we have added built in cost recommendations to Azure portal and Azure Advisor, along with updates to the Azure pricing calculator.
We look forward to seeing what you will build with Azure Cosmos DB!
- Have questions? Email us at AskCosmosDB@microsoft.com any time.
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Azure Cosmos DB
Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft's globally distributed, multi-model database service for mission-critical workloads. Azure Cosmos DB provides turnkey global distribution with unlimited endpoint scalability, elastic scaling of throughput at multiple granularities (e.g., database/key-space as well as, tables/collections/graphs), storage worldwide, single-digit millisecond read and write latencies at the 99th percentile, five well-defined consistency models, and guaranteed high availability, all backed by the industry-leading comprehensive SLAs.
Source: Azure Blog Feed