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Updated: November 18, 2024 (October 6, 2024)

  Analyst Report

New Azure Cosmos DB Features Can Cut Costs

My Atlas / Analyst Reports

1,212 wordsTime to read: 7 min
Rob Sanfilippo by
Rob Sanfilippo

Before joining Directions on Microsoft, Rob worked at Microsoft for 14 years where he designed technologies for Microsoft products and... more

  • Azure Cosmos DB Dynamic Scaling improves the efficiency of automatic scaling, leading to significantly reduced costs.

  • It has the most impact on larger databases with many physical partitions and databases replicated across Azure regions.

  • Customers need to enable the feature for Cosmos DB accounts created before Sept. 25, 2024; it is on by default for newer accounts.

Azure Cosmos DB provides globally distributed databases that support multiple database modes, such as documents, wide-column data, graphs, key-value pairs, and relational data. The Dynamic Scaling feature improves the precision of autoscaling, a deployment option that automatically increases or decreases the request throughput rate of a database based on demand. Dynamic Scaling improves autoscaling so that it is more precisely applied, which can significantly cut costs.

Binary Encoding: Another Cosmos DB Cost Cutter

Azure Cosmos DB Binary Encoding, a new feature that is being incorporated into the service, internally stores text data, such as JSON, in binary form. The Binary conversion reduces the storage required for text on average by 20% and up to 70%. The reduced storage requirements cut costs, and Microsoft claims Binary Encoding improves query performance by up to 76%.
Binary Encoding cannot be enabled or disabled by customers. It is used by all new Cosmos DB containers in new and existing Cosmos DB accounts. Containers created before the feature arrived in Sept. 2024 will be converted to use Binary Encoding starting in 2025. No customer action is required for the conversion, and no downtime will be experienced during the conversion. Customers will be notified by e-mail when conversion of their deployments is initiated.
Customers might choose to redeploy existing containers to immediately gain the benefits of Binary Encoding rather than waiting until the conversion process reaches their deployments; however, redeployment requires downtime and manual effort. 



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