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

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61–70 of 137 posts

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

#61
post #54

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've used it briefly internally at Microsoft 2009, I had almost the same experience. Super slow, takes a while to even start the query, non-standard query language. For internal users there were even more hurdles: you had to get approval and quota before you were able to use it at all, and the default answer to both requests was "no", you really had to justify it. As an aside, at MS "no" was the answer to any request…

It sounds like you're describing the internal big data platform "Cosmos", something which has been made publicly-available as "Azure Data Lake Analytics" and which has no relationship to "CosmosDB" other than a similar name.

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

#62
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used it briefly internally at Microsoft 2009, I had almost the same experience. Super slow, takes a while to even start the query, non-standard query language. For internal users there were even more hurdles: you had to get approval and quota before you were able to use it at all, and the default answer to both requests was "no", you really had to justify it. As an aside, at MS "no" was the answer to any request…

It sounds like you're describing the internal big data platform "Cosmos", something which has been made publicly-available as "Azure Data Lake Analytics" and which has no relationship to "CosmosDB" other than a similar name.

Sounds like a branding mishap, Microsoft created the same type of hard to understand mess with the Microsoft Dynamics branding.

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

#63
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used it briefly internally at Microsoft 2009, I had almost the same experience. Super slow, takes a while to even start the query, non-standard query language. For internal users there were even more hurdles: you had to get approval and quota before you were able to use it at all, and the default answer to both requests was "no", you really had to justify it. As an aside, at MS "no" was the answer to any request…

It sounds like you're describing the internal big data platform "Cosmos", something which has been made publicly-available as "Azure Data Lake Analytics" and which has no relationship to "CosmosDB" other than a similar name.

[deleted]

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

#64
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These are two very different products at two very different price points.

10TB of Table storage is 655$ 10TB of CosmosDb is 2500$

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

#65
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's hard to get behind cloud services that require you to send an email to support engineers to reboot your instance.

Wow, is that really the case? The last “cloud provider” I remember this to be the case was SoftLayer. Is Azure really that bad?

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

#66
post #17
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.

Its a Document Store which has a whole bunch of read/write interfaces, including Graph, Cassandra, "SQL" (Document), and Table.

And this is part of the problem. Only the Document interfaces work correctly and performantly.

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

#67

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…

>Shockingly poor perf

>Random failures

>Largely undocumented

>Painful interop with non-azure proprietary offerings

>Almost zero developer community

>Most of the coverage ... isn't by developers, it's by various MS affiliated blogs such as this one, which are more advertisements than resources.

Welcome to Azure!

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

#68
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to get behind cloud services that require you to send an email to support engineers to reboot your instance.

Wow, is that really the case? The last “cloud provider” I remember this to be the case was SoftLayer. Is Azure really that bad?

Believe it or not Azure is the #2 cloud provider (by revenue?).

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

#69
post #54

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've used it briefly internally at Microsoft 2009, I had almost the same experience. Super slow, takes a while to even start the query, non-standard query language. For internal users there were even more hurdles: you had to get approval and quota before you were able to use it at all, and the default answer to both requests was "no", you really had to justify it. As an aside, at MS "no" was the answer to any request…

That's impressive, considering that this CosmosDB development only started in 2014! You are talking about Cosmos which is still around but is now used as the basis of Azure Data lake [0]. However, I think the closest MS has to Dremel is actually Kusto [1] which has a custom query language but works pretty well.

[0] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-ca/solutions/data-lake/

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/

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

#70
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to get behind cloud services that require you to send an email to support engineers to reboot your instance.

Wow, is that really the case? The last “cloud provider” I remember this to be the case was SoftLayer. Is Azure really that bad?

With AKS (at least in early days, not beta or anything mind you) the kubernetes coordinator node was managed by Microsoft, after a some arbitrary amount of days/weeks it would become unresponsive and the recommended action was to open a ticket and wait for them it restart it.
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