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Azure Cosmos DB: Microsoft's Cloud-Born Globally Distributed Database

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

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Re: Azure Cosmos DB: Microsoft's Cloud-Born Globally Distributed Database

#11

Post by suff »

FTA: "say datacenter automatic failover component, in one part of the territory. Getting this component right may take months of your time. But it is OK. You are building a new street in one of the suburbs, and this adds up to the big picture."

Wait, what?! Driving metaphor aside... 'MONTHS of your time' to implement failover? People, this is WHY the cloud was invented, so we didn't have to spend months re-inventing. In AWS and even GCP, this takes a day or less if you know the (well documented easy to use) storage offerings. Seriously reconsider your selection criteria when you start saying things like this, because what I just heard is that my team just told me implementing failover is going to cost $60k. Guess how much easier that made my case to switch to another cloud-native offering? TCO over everything. Even Ballmer would agree with that - he made the same case for Windows, against Linux in the 90's.

Re: Azure Cosmos DB: Microsoft's Cloud-Born Globally Distributed Database

#12

Post by suff »

kuzehanka wrote: post #3

After trying CosmosDB I put it down pretty quickly. I can't say I'd recommend it to anyone. Shockingly poor perf. Is CosmosDB really that bad or did we have it misconfigured? We're not sure, the docs didn't help us understand. Random failures when connecting. Random errors (or worse, no errors but unexpected results) when querying. Largely undocumented. Painful interop with non-azure proprietary offerings. Almost zer…

Putting it down quickly was your finely tuned technical instincts saving you from disaster.

Re: Azure Cosmos DB: Microsoft's Cloud-Born Globally Distributed Database

#14

Post by zzbzq »

skrebbel wrote: post #10
lkschubert8 wrote: post #9

The absolute worst bug I have ever had to debug was using CosmosDB as table storage. Everything worked fine up until we hit about 1700 records in table storage. Once we hit that point it just stopped returning any records. We eventually find out that if you query using a field that isn't indexed instead of throwing an error or something sane like that it acts like everything is fine and returns an empty set of record…

Woa, wtf. Is that indicative of the general quality level of cosmos?

Sort of. It doesn't really sanity-check anything, ever. It's more of a blank slate and you have to build whatever rules you want into your software layer.

The default mode is to index every field, so you can't get into the OP's situation until you start trying to fine-tune it. He basically turned off the index and then tried to search by it. This is not expected for people who just bring their RDBMS assumptions in and try to wing it without reading any documentation whatsoever.

Re: Azure Cosmos DB: Microsoft's Cloud-Born Globally Distributed Database

#15

Post by m_fayer »

kuzehanka wrote: post #3

After trying CosmosDB I put it down pretty quickly. I can't say I'd recommend it to anyone. Shockingly poor perf. Is CosmosDB really that bad or did we have it misconfigured? We're not sure, the docs didn't help us understand. Random failures when connecting. Random errors (or worse, no errors but unexpected results) when querying. Largely undocumented. Painful interop with non-azure proprietary offerings. Almost zer…

Same experience here. Also found it to be hideously expensive while setting all dials to minimum for experimentation and exploration. There may be a way to configure it for an affordable trial run, but it didn't motivate me to stay and figure it out.

Re: Azure Cosmos DB: Microsoft's Cloud-Born Globally Distributed Database

#16

Post by lkschubert8 »

zzbzq wrote: post #14
skrebbel wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woa, wtf. Is that indicative of the general quality level of cosmos?

Sort of. It doesn't really sanity-check anything, ever. It's more of a blank slate and you have to build whatever rules you want into your software layer. The default mode is to index every field, so you can't get into the OP's situation until you start trying to fine-tune it. He basically turned off the index and then tried to search by it. This is not expected for people who just bring their RDBMS assumptions in an…

I dont know if something changed, but there were no default indexes back when this happened (a year and a half ago). I had done no performance tuning, just created the document collections and added items to them.

Re: Azure Cosmos DB: Microsoft's Cloud-Born Globally Distributed Database

#19

Post by jng »

taffer wrote: post #17
niahmiah wrote: post #5

Sounds similar to cockroachdb, by ex google devs https://www.cockroachlabs.com/

Cockroachdb is a proper SQL Database, Cosmos is just a Document Store that also has an SQL interface.

Can you explain in some precision what you mean by that?

Re: Azure Cosmos DB: Microsoft's Cloud-Born Globally Distributed Database

#20

Post by foobarbazetc »

kuzehanka wrote: post #3

After trying CosmosDB I put it down pretty quickly. I can't say I'd recommend it to anyone. Shockingly poor perf. Is CosmosDB really that bad or did we have it misconfigured? We're not sure, the docs didn't help us understand. Random failures when connecting. Random errors (or worse, no errors but unexpected results) when querying. Largely undocumented. Painful interop with non-azure proprietary offerings. Almost zer…

I can say this exact thing about most Azure services. Nothing really works as documented and everything is more expensive than it should be. I always feel like I’m missing something.
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