Book Image

Guide to NoSQL with Azure Cosmos DB

By : Gaston C. Hillar, Daron Yöndem
Book Image

Guide to NoSQL with Azure Cosmos DB

By: Gaston C. Hillar, Daron Yöndem

Overview of this book

Cosmos DB is a NoSQL database service included in Azure that is continuously adding new features and has quickly become one of the most innovative services found in Azure, targeting mission-critical applications at a global scale. This book starts off by showing you the main features of Cosmos DB, their supported NoSQL data models and the foundations of its scalable and distributed architecture. You will learn to work with the latest available tools that simplify your tasks with Cosmos DB and reduce development costs, such as the Data Explorer in the Azure portal, Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer, and the Cosmos DB Emulator. Next, move on to working with databases and document collections. We will use the tools to run schema agnostic queries against collections with the Cosmos DB SQL dialect and understand their results. Then, we will create a first version of an application that uses the latest .NET Core SDK to interact with Cosmos DB. Next, we will create a second version of the application that will take advantage of important features that the combination of C# and the .NET Core SDK provides, such as POCOs and LINQ queries. By the end of the book, you will be able to build an application that works with a Cosmos DB NoSQL document database with C#, the .NET Core SDK, LINQ, and JSON.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Using built-in array functions


The previous query made sure that it only processes each videogame document that has a level property defined at the root level and its value is an array. However, it is possible to have a new videogame document that declares an empty array ([]) as the value for the level property because the video game doesn't have defined levels yet.

The next query is a new version of the previous query that takes advantage of the ARRAY_LENGTH built-in function. This function returns the number of elements of the array expression received as an argument. The query makes sure that the level property is an array and that it contains at least one element. The results for the query will be the same that were shown for its previous version. The code file for the sample is included in the learning_cosmos_db_03_01 folder in the sql_queries/videogame_1_07.sql file:

SELECT v.id AS videoGameId,  
    v.name AS videoGameName,  
    v.levels[0] AS firstLevel 
FROM Videogames v 
WHERE IS_ARRAY...