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 Azure Storage Explorer to interact with Cosmos DB databases


So far, we have been working with web-based interfaces to interact with a Cosmos DB Azure portal and Cosmos DB Explorer. The nice thing about web-based interfaces is that you can work with them in any compatible modern web browser on different devices. Now, we will explore a GUI tool that allows us to interact with Cosmos DB databases: Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer. Initially, this tool was intended to work with other Azure storage services. However, at the end of 2017, the tool added support for working with Cosmos DB databases.

This tool is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux. You can download and install Azure Storage Explorer here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/features/storage-explorer/. Note that the instructions that I will provide were tested with version 1.4.1 and that you need to work with specific versions of the operating systems in order to be able to run the tool; this might vary in versions higher than...