Cosmos DB: Expanded Programming and Data Options

• Azure Cosmos DB provides a multimodal database service with global scale and replication.
• Language APIs improve query language compatibility with their associated languages, easing migrations.
• Data processing updates introduce traditional real-time change tracking, improving performance.

Azure Cosmos DB continues to receive significant investment as Microsoft expands the service with improved query options and new data management features. Most updates should reduce the effort to migrate existing applications to the service and provide more capabilities that enterprises need for complex applications. Integration with Azure-based analytic services deliver high-speed queries without impacting production but incur additional storage costs.

Service Overview

Cosmos DB is a multimodal database service designed for distributed data applications that need global scaling and high performance. It can support multiple data formats such as documents, graphs, and relational data, and multiple open-source query languages in a single instance. This configuration allows developers to use multiple languages and work with several different data types in the same service where the data can share security settings and replication features. (See the sidebar “Cosmos DB’s Multimodal Data Structure.”)