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

Running queries against a collection with different tools


In Chapter 2, Getting Started with Cosmos DB Development and NoSQL Document Databases, we created an Azure Cosmos DB account with the SQL API, a document database, and a collection. Then, we inserted two JSON documents in the collection. Now, we will run queries against the collection with the two documents to learn the basics of the Cosmos DB dialect of SQL and how to run queries in the different web-based and GUI tools.

When Cosmos DB was launched, one of the most frustrating issues was that the only available tool to run queries was the web-based the Azure portal with its screen real estate problems. Luckily, Microsoft added the web-based Azure Cosmos DB Explorer and included support for Cosmos DB in the Azure Storage Explorer GUI tool. The three tools allow us to run queries against a collection by following very simple steps.

Note

If you decide to work with the Azure Cosmos DB Emulator, you can use the web-based portal for the emulator...