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Microsoft DocumentDB: A JSON Document Oriented NoSQL Database

Microsoft DocumentDB: A JSON Document Oriented NoSQL Database

Microsoft’s recent addition into the world of NoSQL Databases has been greeted with quite a fanfare and with mixed reviews from competing products. What is interesting is that Microsoft chose DocumentDB as a new Azure-only feature against enhancing its already existing table storage capabilities.

DocumentDB is a JSON document only database as a service. A significant feature included in DocumentDB, that is missing in its traditional rivals, is the support for rich queries (including support for LINQ) and transaction support. What is also interesting is that the new SQL syntax for querying JSON documents automatically recognizes native JavaScript constructs. It also supports programmability features such as user defined functions, stored procedures, and triggers. Given that it is backed by Azure with high availability and scalability, the offering seems to hold an extremely promising future.

To start, first create a new instance of DocumentDB in your Microsoft Azure Preview portal.

Click New in the preview portal and select DocumentDB. Specify a name and additional details like the capacity configuration and resource group. Go ahead and click the Create button to create an instance of DocumentDB. After creating the instance you can get the URI and keys by clicking on the Keys tile.

Done! You are now good to start using DocumentDB to store and query JSON documents. In your instance of Visual Studio, run the following NuGet command using the package manager console to install the pre-requisites in order to start programming with DocumentDB.

PM> Install-Package Microsoft.Azure.Documents.Client -Pre

If you want to program it using JavaScript, you can also install the JavaScript SDK from here https://github.com/Azure/azure-documentdb-js, and then leverage the REST interface to access DocumentDB using permissions authorization. In a future post, we will look at some of the language constructs in programming with DocumentDB.

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