Best Practices For Working With Azure Cosmos Db

1. Choose The Appropriate Data Model And Right Api

• Use the appropriate data model (e.g., document, key-value, graph, column-family) based on your application’s needs.
• Use the right APIs that best suits your application’s requirements and preferences. Azure Cosmos DB supports various APIs such as SQL API, MongoDB API, Cassandra API, Gremlin API, and Table API.

2. Choose The Best Consistency Level.

• Azure Cosmos DB offers five consistency levels such as: strong, bounded staleness, session, consistent prefix, and eventual.
• Choose the appropriate consistency level based on your application’s requirements and trade-offs between consistency and performance.

3. Optimize The Partition Key To Improve Performance And Scalability.

• Azure Cosmos DB automatically partitions your data across multiple physical partitions based on the partition key you specify.
• A good partition key should have high cardinality, even distribution, and align with your query patterns.

4. Monitor And Tune Performance Regularly To Ensure Optimal Performance.

• Set up Cosmos DB diagnostic logs and metrics to monitor performance, errors, and resource usage.
• Integrate with Azure Monitor and Application Insights for advanced monitoring and alerting.

5. Implement Data Retention Policies And Archival Strategies To Manage Data Growth And Costs Effectively.

• Cosmos DB retention policy refers to how long and how often Azure Cosmos DB backs up your data.
• By default, Cosmos DB takes a full backup every 4 hours and retains the last 2 backups, which are free of charge.
• You can change the backup interval and retention period, but you will be charged extra for more than 2 backups.
• Utilize time-to-live (TTL) settings for automatic data expiration.

6. Multi-Region Data Distribution (Geo-Replication) And Multi-Region Writes (Multi-Master)

• Azure Cosmos DB can replicate and distribute your data to any or all Azure regions.
• Single region Azure Cosmos DB accounts have guaranteed 99.99% availability and adding additional regions to your Azure Cosmos DB account can further improve availability.
• Adding additional regions also helps lower latency by placing data physically closer to your users.

7. Use The.Net Sdk To Manage Azure Cosmos Db Resources.

• The.NET SDK provides a convenient way to interact with Azure Cosmos DB from your.NET applications.
• Azure SDKs for Cosmos DB are optimized for your programming language to simplify development and improve performance.
• You can use the SDK to create, read, update, and delete items in an Azure Cosmos DB container.

8. Performance & Cost Optimization

• When you created your new account, you had to choose the database operations pricing model that best meets the requirements of the application or workload.
• Select the best option between the provisioned throughput and serverless models.
  These are the few best practices listed above. Backup and Disaster Recovery, Cost Management, Capacity Planning, Security and Query Optimization are some of the other best practices recommended.

Azure Cosmos DB is a No SQL database service that supports flexible schemas and hierarchical data for modern applications. It is a globally distributed, multi-model database service that supports document, key-value, wide-column, and graph databases. Azure Cosmos DB service takes care of database administration, updates, patching, and scaling. It also provides cost-effective serverless and automatic scaling options that match capacity with demand. Cosmos DB integrates with other Azure services and tools, such as Azure Functions, IoT Hub, AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service), App Service, and more. The Azure SDK for JavaScript is a collection of libraries that you can use to interact with various Azure services from your JavaScript applications. It supports both Node.js and browser environments.

In this article, we will learn about working with ‘Azure Cosmos DB and the JavaScript SDK’. CRUD operations and other common operations on Azure Cosmos DB resources can be done using the JavaScript SDK. The Cosmos DB JavaScript SDK is primarily meant for use in Node.js applications.

To work with Azure Cosmos DB, the user needs to create the Cosmos DB by configuring it from the Azure Portal. If you already have an Azure Cosmos DB you can use it by following the steps after the ‘creation of Azure Cosmos DB’. As a prerequisite, users need to have an Azure subscription.