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

Working with the web-based Azure Cosmos DB Explorer


So far, we have been working with the portal and our screen real estate has been reduced as we selected new options that required additional panels. We can take advantage of Cosmos DB Explorer to open the Cosmos DB database account in a new browser tab and take advantage of a full-screen view.

Click Open Full Screen on the toolbar for the Cosmos DB database account. Cosmos DB will generate read-write and read-only access URLs that we can use to access the database and the collection in which we are working with Cosmos DB Explorer. The following screenshot shows a sample modal:

The URL will start with https://cosmos.azure.com/?key= followed by a key that will provide time-bound access to the Cosmos DB account with read-write or read-only access.

We just need to copy the URL and open it in a new browser tab. This way, we can work with Cosmos DB databases, collections, and documents with more screen real estate in any web browser. The following...