Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 137 posts

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

#101

Post by jjirsa »

ZeroCool2u wrote: post #40

Based on the feedback here, it's hard to imagine anyone choosing Cosmos DB over Spanner or just CockroachDB. I'm not familiar with the AWS equivalent, but it seems like Azure isn't exactly setting the bar high.

Really? You can’t figure out why someone might use a Microsoft hosted db over one at google or one they’d have to run themselves?

Azure’s growth rate is amazing. There’s a ton of adoption there that doesn’t have access to spanner, or maybe has a document based data model, where spanner / cockroach doesn’t make any sense

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

#102

Post by sthota »

shearnie wrote: post #8

Cosmosdb still doesn’t support skip and take. And aggregate queries are incredibly inefficient. We’ve had to move a heap of data from cosdb to sql server, our reports ran from 3 hours, to now 5 minutes after moving to SQL.

Hi, I am from Azure Cosmos DB engineering team.

We continue to optimize our indexing layout – there are several key improvements being rolled out. Please share the details of your expensive query (askcosmosdb@microsoft.com) to help us investigate.

OFFSET/LIMIT (Skip/Take) is currently in private preview. It will be broadly available by 5/15/2019.

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

#103

Post by sthota »

chupa-chups wrote: post #37

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 fu…

Hi, I am from Cosmos DB engineering team.

For SQL API, the collection names have a limit of 255 bytes (we will update the documentation). For Mongo API, we honor the limit prescribed by the API for the combination of . to be 120 bytes as explained here - https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/limits/#Restrictio...

We continue to optimize our indexing layout – there are several key improvements being rolled out. Please share the details of your expensive query (askcosmosdb@microsoft.com) to help us investigate.

OFFSET/LIMIT (Skip/Take) is currently in private preview. It will be broadly available by 5/15/2019.

We are working on customer controlled PITR, which will be available later this year.

Thank you for the feedback!

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

#104

Post by pojzon »

dekayed wrote: post #56
victor106 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Could you go more into this? How did you go about the evaluation and what metrics were you using? How did you capture the 'developers just hated it' in a way that leadership understood? I'm not disputing the outcome, just feel like it would be useful for others in a similar situation.

Gonna second this. We are also in a situation where a few of the higher management were clearly bribed to push our company into Azure direction but the amount of problems we see may destroy our company..

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

#105

Post by manigandham »

jng wrote: post #19
taffer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

SQL = structured query language. It's just an interface to access data. All relational databases offer it but so do many other non-relational systems. This means using SQL to read/write data is completely separate from having relational functionality like joins.

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

#106

Post by sthota »

llcoolv wrote: post #43
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…

Unfortunately, I could only second this opinion and add a few points of mine. 1. Many unexpected behaviours which you would not encounter in any other software - for example when you're blocked by its firewall, it would let you connect on all 7 OSI layers, then kick you out with "Command failed with error 13: 'Not Authenticated' on server xyz:10255'". By the way even Azure Portal itself doesn't know how to handle thi…

Hi, I am from Cosmos DB engineering team.

1. This occurs when, after the connection has been established, CRUD commands are sent before the authentication command. Note that some MongoDB drivers have a bug where they are not authenticating the connection in rare cases and sending CRUD commands. Could you please check and upgrade to the latest driver of Mongoose/NodeJS-Native/NodeJS-Core driver, which has a rewrite of their client-side auth stack and fixes a lot of bugs. One of such issues is described in https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/NODE-1798 which was fixed by https://github.com/mongodb-js/mongodb-core/commit/7ffb4bbe05...

2. Resource tokens provide fine grained access control but it does require you to implement a custom token management service. We are working on support for Azure AD integration and support for custom roles and policies. The feature is code complete and should be made available soon.

3. Cosmos DB’s SQL query language is supported on a non-relational data model - which maps cleanly to document/column-family/graph. It does not support joins since (unlike a relational model), a single Cosmos container can contain items belonging to any arbitrary schema.

4. Re. API for MongoDB requiring a shard key, we are going to relax this restriction before 7/30/2019. As you noted, we do support an emulator for Windows. We are working on a Linux emulator and should be released later this year.

5. The portal was displaying incorrect cost estimate in certain cases. We addressed it and the fix is being rolled out.

Thank you for the feedback!

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

#108

Post by jaabe »

splinter89 wrote: post #90
ecmascript wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cmon this is an extremely exaggerated opinion. I have used Azure and AWS and I find Azure to be much easier and user friendly. Maybe at very large scale AWS shines through, but I would choose Azure over AWS any day.

you're literally the mythical unicorn, I don't know a single person that has appreciated using Azure. I'd personally trade my first born with no second thoughts to use AWS instead.

I work in the European public sector, I can name you a few reasons to pick Azure over AWS. None of them are technical though, so you certainly have a point.

Microsoft is just better at selling the whole package to enterprise where your primary function isn’t tech.

They were first to incorporate EU legislation, and are frankly still the only of the three big cloud suppliers that can show us exactly where our data has been or passed through at any time.

Their support is also excellent. We pay Microsoft a lot of money, much more than the cost of Azure because of licensing, but with it comes support. If something breaks down, I can call Seattle directly after which we will receive hourly updates by phone until the matter is resolved.

With google you get to fill a form or chat with a bot. AWS is better, but again mostly to their big customers, and since we aren’t buying office 365 or licenses from them, we’re just not big enough to qualify for the support we need.

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

#109

Post by kirillg_hn »

minedwiz wrote: post #32
foobarbazetc wrote: post #20

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.

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

Hi, I am from Cosmos DB engineering team, I'm sorry to hear you ran into issues with our .NET SDK. We're constantly updating our SDKs, and welcome feedback on GitHub, please post the issues there and we will get back to you shortly. For the current generally available .NET SDK V2, the GitHub page is at [1]. The upcoming V3 version of Cosmos DB .NET SDK is open sourced at [2], please give it a try when you have a chance / tell us what you think. [1] https://github.com/Azure/azure-cosmos-dotnet-v2 [2] https://github.com/Azure/azure-cosmos-dotnet-v3

Thanks for the feedback.

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

#110

Post by llcoolv »

manigandham wrote: post #74
llcoolv wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, I could only second this opinion and add a few points of mine. 1. Many unexpected behaviours which you would not encounter in any other software - for example when you're blocked by its firewall, it would let you connect on all 7 OSI layers, then kick you out with "Command failed with error 13: 'Not Authenticated' on server xyz:10255'". By the way even Azure Portal itself doesn't know how to handle thi…

CosmosDB is a JSON-based document store and it uses partitions to scale out your data. No document-store supports joins. The SQL support is only an interface to your data, it doesn't add relational functionality. The partitionkey is required so that CosmosDB knows which partition to query. You can actually enable broadcast queries which will ask every partition if you don't want to include the partition key, but this…

In reality it is a document store indeed, but it is advertised by MS themselves as "globally-distributed, multi-model database service". So...
Post reply on HN