Today, we are thrilled to announce the upcoming general availability of Azure DocumentDB – Microsoft’s fully managed NoSQL document database service.

Available now as Preview and Generally Available on April 8th, DocumentDB allows developers to build new applications that store, query and process data without rigid constraints on schema or the need to manage infrastructure. In a world of evolving user needs and fierce competition, our goal is to deliver a database service that lets you focus more on your applications and less on infrastructure. As a managed service, DocumentDB removes the heavy lifting of provisioning, managing and scaling virtual machines. You can create a database account in minutes, provision the resources you need and scale the database as your application grows.

Since the Preview release of DocumentDB, we’ve been working closely with customers to launch new applications and experiences on the service. MSN is live with its use of DocumentDB for their user data store serving MSN users across web and mobile experiences. Mobile operator Telenor chose DocumentDB to boost their time-to-market for a new Office 365 promotion system.

“Azure DocumentDB was a natural fit for what we were doing … It was very easy to change schema along the way. When we needed to add or change attributes and classes, there was no problem on the back end.” Andreas Helland, Mobility Architect, Telenor

We are really excited to see what developers are building with DocumentDB. From IoT systems to immersive retail and content experiences – DocumentDB’s ease of use, performance and scale make it well suited for a variety of application scenarios.

We’ve built DocumentDB to handle the most demanding enterprise and at-scale consumer services. We’ve also focused on providing a powerful combination of features and capabilities for this NoSQL database service.

 

• Rich queries with familiar SQL and JavaScript syntax – use DocumentDB to store heterogeneous JSON documents and query these documents through a familiar SQL syntax with language integrated JavaScript. DocumentDB’s query language supports rich relational and hierarchical queries through a familiar SQL dialect. It is rooted in JavaScript’s type system, expression evaluation and function invocation model.
• Write optimized with automatic indexing – develop applications that store and query documents concurrently, with consistent results for users. DocumentDB is write-optimized and schema-agnostic to serve consistent queries in the face of a sustained volume of document writes. By default, the database engine automatically indexes all documents and properties without requiring schema or secondary indexes.
• Multi-document transactions – offload complex transactional processing to the database tier through DocumentDB’s multi-document, transactional execution of stored procedures and triggers. Stored procedures and triggers allow you to efficiently process JSON documents through small JavaScript programs executed within the database. DocumentDB’s deep integration of JavaScript eliminates the impedance mismatch between programming languages/type-systems and the database schema.
• Tunable consistency levels – tune your data consistency to achieve the best application performance with DocumentDB. Well defined, predictable and easy to use; these tunable data consistency options allow you to make deterministic tradeoffs between read consistency and performance. DocumentDB’s session consistency offers read-your-write guarantees with high performance reads and writes.

 

With the announcement of general availability in April, we are also introducing new performance levels and hourly billing for the standard pricing tier. We’ve implemented these changes to give you more control and flexibility in how you purchase service capacity.  Each database account can consist of data partitions with a mix of performance levels to meet the unique needs of your application. As these needs change over time, you can adjust performance levels allowing for cost effective use of resources.

Get started with Azure DocumentDB today and your account will be automatically migrated to the new offers at general availability. We offer a broad set of SDKs including support for .Net, Node, Java and Python. We’re also working hard to make sure DocumentDB integrates well with other Azure data services including HDInsight and Azure Search.

We look forward to seeing what you build with DocumentDB. We’ll continue to add new capabilities to the service and as always, we’re listening. Please send us your feedback through comments below, the forum or by tweeting with #DocumentDB.

Thanks,

Azure DocumentDB Team