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

Creating models and customizing serialization


So far, we have been working with dynamic objects and we wrote SQL queries in strings without taking advantage of the beloved LINQ features. Now we will create a new version of the application that will use POCOs to represent the competitions. This way, we will be able to use strongly typed properties and work with LINQ to build queries instead of composing queries with strings.

Whenever we have to persist a document in the document database, the C# object that represents the document will be serialized to a JSON document; that is, it will be encoded in a string. Whenever we have to retrieve a document from the document database, the JSON document will be deserialized to the C# object that represents the document; that is, the object will be built from the string.

Note

One of the key benefits of working with Cosmos DB, its .NET Core SDK, and a document database based on the SQL API is that we don't have to use an Object-Relational Mapping (ORM)...