Azure Cosmos DB

Timothy Smith
The Azure Portal view of our SQL API database in our Azure Cosmos DB

Creating and Removing Databases with PowerShell In Azure Cosmos DB

May 27, 2019 by

Our testing or development may call for dynamic creation on the database level for Azure Cosmos DB rather than the account level. As we’ve seen with dynamically working with a Cosmos database account using PowerShell, we can create, remove, and obtain properties of the account. Identically, we can do this on the database level as well and we may use this in testing if we need the same Cosmos database account for other testing purposes. Development situations may also involve use cases where we want to test a concept and dynamically create a database within our Cosmos database account. In this tip, we’ll look at working with our Azure Cosmos database account on the database object level where we do nothing to manipulate the account itself, only add databases to the account once it’s been setup.

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Timothy Smith
We can regenerate keys in the Azure Portal for our Azure Cosmos DB

Getting and Updating Connection Information for Azure Cosmos DB

May 24, 2019 by

After we set up our Azure Cosmos DB, we may want to get, add to, or update existing properties. We may use some of the get functionality that PowerShell provides to dynamically save values to encrypted configuration files or tables that we use for application purposes and this functionality could be added to the creation of the Cosmos database account, or a separate step in addition to the creation. In secure contexts, this ensures security without the properties after passing through human eyes since they are saved directly to an encrypted location. In the same manner, we may want to regenerate the keys for the account and save the connection strings with the new keys.

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Timothy Smith
The options we see when we select the download template for automation

Creating and Removing Azure Cosmos DBs with PowerShell

May 21, 2019 by

When managing Azure Cosmos DB, we can use the Azure portal and create resources through the interface or use the command line in the portal and create resources. PowerShell also supports some functionality for creating and managing these resources, which can help development teams automate the creation of these databases for quick creations, unit and security tests, removals if the resources aren’t required following the tests. We can also use these scripts for creating templates that we may use in multi-scaling creations (like databases in a group designed for horizontal scale). Generally, in one-off situations, the Azure Portal will suffice for deployments if there is a cost to develop automation that is not required. In this tip, we’ll look at the process of creating a blank and removing the same Azure Cosmos DB.

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Timothy Smith

Getting Started with Subdocuments in Azure Cosmos DB

February 22, 2019 by

As we’ve worked with Azure Cosmos DB, we’ve seen that we can store data within fields and the fields of each document don’t always have to match – though we still want some organization for querying. The fields and values storage becomes useful when working with object-oriented languages as these fields can be keys that we use with values that we extract as properties. For an example, the below PowerShell line creates a JSON document in an object and we can see that we can extract the values of these keys in the JSON object.

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Timothy Smith

Applying Field Operators and Objects in Azure Cosmos DB

February 15, 2019 by

Since we will sometimes require removing documents in Azure Cosmos DB, we’ll want to be able to specify the documents for removal. In some cases, this will be as simple as specifying a field for removal, such as removing one type of workout in our temporary database we’ve created. In other delete situations, we’ll want to remove if the value of the field isn’t what we expect – such as greater than what we want. This applies to updates as well – we may want to drill into a specific value range for an update. In this tip, we’ll look at using operators with strings, numeric types and dates.

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Timothy Smith

Updating and Querying Details in Azure Cosmos DB

February 12, 2019 by

In the first part of this series Getting Started with Azure Cosmos DB, we looked at using Azure Cosmos DB for saving an individual’s fitness routine and why this database structure is better for this data than a SQL database while also showing that we still have to organize our structure like a file system organizes files. In this part of our series, we’ll begin looking at the terminology translation between NoSQL and SQL along with running updates for our documents and queries with filters that return some fields in our document, but not other fields.

Timothy Smith

Getting Started with Azure Cosmos DB

February 11, 2019 by

In the past two years, we’ve seen an explosion in growth with document-oriented databases like Azure Cosmos DB. MongoDB – one of the major document databases – went live on the Nasdaq and attracted some attention in the past year as well. While more developers are using the document structure for some appropriate data models, less than 10 years ago, some in the industry were predicting that document databases were unnecessary and wouldn’t last because all data could be flattened to fit the SQL model. I took the opposite approach, being an early adopter of MongoDB along with continuing to use SQL databases as I saw opportunities in both SQL and NoSQL for various data structures. While some data do fit the SQL model and SQL will continue to exist, some data are best for document databases, like Azure Cosmos DB. In this series, we’ll be looking at the why and how of document databases.

Daniel Calbimonte

Azure Cosmos DB from zero to 10 minutes

May 10, 2016 by

Introduction

In our last chapter, we talked about Cosmos DB, which is available in Azure and explained that it is an Azure Database used to store NoSQL documents.

In this new article, we will show how to create and query the database from zero. The only requirement is to have an Azure Account. If you have an Azure account, this tutorial will take you just 10 minutes (if not, you can complain in the comments section below 😉 ).

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