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

Understanding the requirements for the first version of an application


So far, we have been working with different web-based and GUI tools to interact with the Cosmos DB service and a document database with the SQL API. We have been using a single partition and the default indexing options. Now we will leverage our existing Cosmos DB knowledge to perform the different operations we learned with the Cosmos DB .NET Core SDK. In addition, we will work with a partition key and customized indexing options.

First, we will create an application that will work with dynamic documents without any schema by taking advantage of the dynamic keyword to create dynamic objects. The use of this keyword is one of a few possible approaches to interacting with Cosmos DB JSON documents in .NET Core and C#. The clear advantage of this approach is that we don't need to create a class that represents the documents just to perform a few operations with a collection. We will look at many common scenarios with the...