Azure Cosmos DB Overview

Azure Cosmos DB is a multi-model database service that provides global scaling, replication, and high throughput. It is designed for large-scale applications with multiple data formats that need to integrate and share data.

A key driver to Microsoft’s strategy for Cosmos DB is to address the growing use of mobile development architectures, such as MongoDB, Express, Angular JS, and Node.js (MEAN), that rely on NoSQL database platforms.

Supported Database Models

Azure Cosmos DB currently supports the following data models:

Documents are a popular data format for Web and mobile applications that need a lightweight, flexible data solution that also works across platforms. Documents are the original data model deployed in the service and are accessible via a Microsoft-defined SQL API (previously called DocumentDB API) and the MongoDB API, derived from a popular open-source document database.

Key-value pairs are a nonrelational data format used for storing lists of data that need to be accessed very quickly. As compared to a relational database, key-value pairs can contain a variety of data that do not follow a consistent data type, so long as each record in the list has a unique key associated with any value. The data model is accessed via the Azure Table API, which is also used for accessing Azure Storage Table data.