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Azure Cosmos DB, a globally distributed database

docs.microsoft.com

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Re: Azure Cosmos DB, a globally distributed database

#41

Post by rattray »

I find this product slightly befuddling.

It seems like a "just throw all your data in this" kind of database, probably intended for everything but core application relational data (so, good for analytics, messaging, etc).

It sounds like the atom-record-sequence model at the heart of it is pretty key, but there's not a lot in the article about what that is and how it works. Is this a well-understood data structure used elsewhere?

The project seems very ambitious, and I could see it being used pretty heavily at a lot of companies. Thoughts?

Re: Azure Cosmos DB, a globally distributed database

#42

Post by rattray »

aliostad wrote: post #32
jasondc wrote: post #4

> Latency: 99.99% of Impressive SLA to guarantee, I'm curious if this will hold up in all random customer workloads that are coming, e.g. updating a lot of fields in a large document (or just a very large insert).

We just did a benchmarking for a PoC on DocumentDB side-by-side Cassandra. It does the job, I have not yet seen anything revolutionary. Cassandra benchmarks seemed better.

Given that this makes bolder claims that Cassandra, near-parity is pretty impressive, no?

(I don't know a ton about either technology, please correct me if I'm wrong)

Re: Azure Cosmos DB, a globally distributed database

#43

Post by arosenbaum »

random3 wrote: post #36
afeezaziz wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a real life case study of people/startup using Cloud Spanner? I am wondering what are the use cases of Spanner that cannot be fulfilled by other Google Cloud Platform products.

relational model globally distributed ACID transactions 99.999 availability to name a few

Please post link where they talk about transactions - I can't find it in the docs anywhere. Availability SLA is clearly not 5 9's - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/sla/cosmos-d...

Re: Azure Cosmos DB, a globally distributed database

#44

Post by chaostheory »

obmelvin wrote: post #16
chaostheory wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My questions were rhetorical. One reason I post my thoughts here is because companies like MS are on HN. It's useful to know why people don't want to use your product or are hesitant to do so. Besides, MS has been doing a lot of surprising things lately post-Ballmer.

This is meant for people who need services and guarantees that can only be provided by a huge infrastructure provider

You can say the same for pretty much every other managed datastore service

Re: Azure Cosmos DB, a globally distributed database

#46

Post by chaostheory »

Thaxll wrote: post #35
chaostheory wrote: post #6

Is it open source? Why do I care? The same reason I don't use AWS or Google Cloud only datastores: I want to avoid vendor lockin.

Vendor lock in is a bad example, it's not like you're going to move your infrastructure from AWS to Google every 6months. And if you do you will have many more complicated problems than vendor lock in.

Just having an easier option to move gives you a better advantage for pricing and it gives the service provider more of an incentive to do more to keep you on their platform.

Re: Azure Cosmos DB, a globally distributed database

#48

Post by datasage »

rattray wrote: post #41

I find this product slightly befuddling. It seems like a "just throw all your data in this" kind of database, probably intended for everything but core application relational data (so, good for analytics, messaging, etc). It sounds like the atom-record-sequence model at the heart of it is pretty key, but there's not a lot in the article about what that is and how it works. Is this a well-understood data structure use…

Its not uncommon to in sass stacks to have multiple data stores, each specialized for different use cases. I do see it appealing to have one system that can support each type of use case and able to tune that as needed.

Re: Azure Cosmos DB, a globally distributed database

#49

Post by tosh »

dharmashuklaMS wrote: post #37

Hi, This is Dharma from Azure Cosmos DB team. We are super excited to make the service available today.We published the first of the series of technical blog posts here -> https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/a-technical-overview-... . Would love to answer any Cosmos DB questions.

Can you give an overview on how Cosmos differs from Spanner and CockroachDB?

Re: Azure Cosmos DB, a globally distributed database

#50

Post by curiousDog »

dharmashuklaMS wrote: post #40
henriksen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. It's a new database and is a superset of DocumentDB.

Azure Cosmos DB has been many years in the making. Azure Cosmos DB started as “Project Florence” in late 2010 to address developer the pain-points faced by large scale applications inside Microsoft. Observing that the challenges of building globally distributed apps are not a problem unique to Microsoft, in 2015 we made the first generation of this technology available to Azure developers in the form of DocumentDB. S…

Does Cosmos DB support distributed transactions like Spanner? Would be nice to see a deeper dive into Transactions like how isolation works etc.
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