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

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

#31

Post by tannhaeuser »

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.

May I ask that we shouldn't use the term Document Store or Document for JSONish data as used by Mongo, and by extension AWS "DocumentDB" and Cosmos DB. The term supposedly emphasizes that data graphs are stored as they are posted and requested by simple webapps (as opposed to normalized relational data), but that still hasn't anything to do with documents as understood by most people. It just poisons the search space (and AWS calling their impl DocumentDB doesn't help either).

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

#32

Post by minedwiz »

foobarbazetc wrote: post #20
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.

If it is documented at all. Even their .NET SDK blows

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

#33

Post by ignoramous »

This post is interesting but one or two MS employees did reveal some key details about CosmosDB in the original announcement thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14308814

(edited)

> There are many significant differences in capabilities, and design approaches between other systems (CockroachDB and Spanner) and Cosmos DB. At a very high level differences are at two levels - the design of the database engine and the larger distributed system.

> The database engine design is inspired by

> 1. LLAMA: http://db.disi.unitn.eu/pages/VLDBProgram/pdf/research/p853-...

> 2. Bwtree: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7655/9c6cc259c6ab5baf7bd19d...

> 3. Schema-agnostic indexing techniques: http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol8/p1668-shukla.pdf.

> Please note that these papers are significantly behind the current state of the implementation. The most crucial aspect that these papers dont cover is the integration of the database engine with the larger distributed system components of Cosmos DB including the resource governance, partition management, and the implementation of replication protocol / consistency models etc.

> Our goal is to publish all of the design specifications including TLA+ specs over time.

---

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/a-technical-overview-...

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-cosmos-db-pushi...

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

#34

Post by victor106 »

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 second this. We evaluated AWS, Azure and GCP for a very large healthcare company and found that Azure was the worst cloud services provider for anything. This was in spite a big push by leadership to encourage Azure, developers just hated it

Between AWS and GCP even though AWS come out on top, GCP wins in quite a few services.

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

#35

Post by enitihas »

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…

That sounds really bad. I wonder how did Azure gain marketshare with a core offering (database) being so broken.

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

#36

Post by suff »

silverlake wrote: post #23
suff wrote: post #11

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.…

He's talking about building the underlying failover mechanism for CosmoDB. For a customer it's easy and automatic, but GCP and AWS and Azure have to build it first.

Surely you're referring to Microsoft's team's time to implement failover to the product offering, not time every customer spends on implementation???

FTA: "if _you_ are an engineer working on a small thing, say datacenter automatic failover component" (emphasis added). Pretty sure he's talking about EVERY customer spending months to turn on fail-over.

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

#37

Post by chupa-chups »

We used it also. Ran into the issue that collection (?) names are limited to 64 chars(1) (which wasn't documented anywhere), triggering obscure errors while everything was fine from the Azure Frontend.

Also even simple queries using an index (and a uniform document structure) cost a comparatively huge amount of RUs compared to a competitor.

Icing on the cake was the non-support for paging at that time, and a total fuck-up when we tried a restore from backup operation (which can only be done by calling MS support, no automated way possible). If anyone wants to know details I can provide those.

Needless to say we switched to another provider.

(1) the names were generated by our automated deployment step, something like {environment}_{product}_{collection-name}

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

#38

Post by ui-explorer12 »

ResidentSleeper wrote: post #28
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…

That's sad to hear. I've had a lot of fun playing around with Azure's table/blob storage services. Never deployed a large production app with them, but the performance seemed decent (eg. when using table storage as a json store). I did look at Cosmos DB but decided not to give it a try when I saw the pricing.

I like their table/blob and queue storage, but maybe it's because it's relatively mature and the domain is well understood. Most of the comparable services from other providers are generic analogs.

I'm not sure I feel much different across Azure Cosmos and Aws Dynamo. It seems super-easy to get locked into a relatively expensive proprietary offering in each case.

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

#39

Post by equasar »

ResidentSleeper wrote: post #28
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…

That's sad to hear. I've had a lot of fun playing around with Azure's table/blob storage services. Never deployed a large production app with them, but the performance seemed decent (eg. when using table storage as a json store). I did look at Cosmos DB but decided not to give it a try when I saw the pricing.

I second this, Azure Table Storage is an amazing product, but would be a more powerful one if they enable indexing on all columns and also any automatic backup options, which are only available on CosmosDB Table, which makes me thing that Azure wants to push me to use CosmosDB if I want those features, since they don't have a roadmap for this for the Azure Table Storage.
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