Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB Logo

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pros and cons

Vendor: Microsoft
4.1 out of 5
Badge Ranked 1
137 followers
Post review

Pros & Cons summary

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.
Get the report

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is valued for its scalability, allowing users to start small and grow as needed, and providing instantaneous resource availability.
Its integration capabilities, such as MongoDB API compatibility, enhance flexibility and ease of use for developers.
The global synchronization and geo-replication features ensure high availability and performance across regions.
Real-time analytics capabilities allow for quick data retrieval, critical for applications like fraud detection.
Azure Cosmos DB offers multi-model support and low-latency access, which are essential for modern applications requiring flexible schema handling.

CONS

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's query complexity is a concern, with users desiring more freedom to create custom queries for non-traditional use cases.
Integration challenges exist, such as the inability to integrate Cosmos DB with Databricks and issues with MongoDB API compatibility.
Technical support needs improvement, often taking several days to respond, and the documentation for integration with other components is insufficient.
There are concerns around Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's scalability and performance, particularly with handling large data volumes in a timely manner.
The pricing model is complicated and expensive, posing a challenge for users to understand and manage costs efficiently.
 

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB Pros review quotes

reviewer2542083 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 9, 2024
Change feed is a pretty amazing feature. Once you make the changes, they are quickly read for you, and then you also have geo-replication. You can do a lot of things in your region, and the same regions can be replicated all over the world.
Karlo Zatylny - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 17, 2024
We chose Azure Cosmos DB initially because of the type of data that we needed to store. We have a schema that is very nondeterministic and flexible. It is always changing based on whatever data we need to acquire from different devices, so we needed a document store with a flexible schema.
MichaelJohn - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 25, 2024
The most valuable feature of Azure Cosmos DB is its scalability. That is the biggest reason I use Azure Cosmos DB.
Learn what your peers think about Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2024.
829,541 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Joel Hulen - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 24, 2024
The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is its ability to handle concurrency and consistency.
Cornell Emile - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 30, 2024
Specifically, we are using the MongoDB API, so we leverage it in that way. I like the flexibility that it offers. My team does not have to spend time building out database tables. We can get going fairly quickly with being able to read and write data into a MongoDB collection that is hosted inside Azure Cosmos DB.
Yoni Nijs - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 26, 2024
It gives us a lot of flexibility. The scaling is instantaneous as well. You immediately have all the resources available.
Michael Calvin - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 9, 2024
The querying language and the SDKs they've provided over the years have been phenomenal, giving us a significant advantage.
Aasif Bagdadi - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 16, 2024
The fact that scalability can be achieved by simply configuring availability zones is very attractive.
AH
Nov 20, 2024
The most valuable features include the global write capability, which allows customers to read and write across different regions simultaneously, enhancing performance and availability.
VS
Jan 3, 2023
rate Azure support nine out of 10. They respond quickly and will help you manage costs. However, they mainly give you an overview of the issue, so they'll never have an in-depth idea of what you're doing. They aren't the owners of our product, so they don't know much about it, but they can ask you generally: What are you doing? Are you doing too many updates? How can we reduce the cost?
 

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB Cons review quotes

reviewer2542083 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 9, 2024
In the long run, there should be an addition of more features, especially because this space is evolving quickly. It all boils down to how many more features you are adding, how many integrations you are supporting, and how many more APIs you have that are standard APIs.
Karlo Zatylny - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 17, 2024
The one thing that I have been working on with Microsoft with regard to this is the ability to easily split partitions and have it do high-performance cross-partition queries. That is the only place where either our data size or our throughput has grown beyond one partition, so being able to do cross-partition queries efficiently would be my number one request.
MichaelJohn - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 25, 2024
Firstly, having a local development emulator or simulator for Azure Cosmos DB would be beneficial. It would be very handy to have a Docker container that developers can use locally.
Learn what your peers think about Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2024.
829,541 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Joel Hulen - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 24, 2024
The first one is the ability to assign role-based access control through the Azure portal for accounts to have contributor rights.
Cornell Emile - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 30, 2024
It is easy to use, but optimization has been a mixed experience. It has been more of trying to figure out how to do so. We have not found much support there, so we have to come up with our own way of optimizing it in different ways. That is one area of improvement.
Yoni Nijs - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 26, 2024
There are multiple approaches to implementing multitenant architecture on Azure Cosmos DB, but there is still no single or best-recommended approach when you have a big variance in the size of your tenants. That is something that still needs to be worked on.
Michael Calvin - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 9, 2024
Azure Cosmos DB could be better for business intelligence and analytical queries.
Aasif Bagdadi - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 16, 2024
An improvement could include increasing the document size or providing a method to manage larger sets efficiently. If they want to keep a 2 MB limit, they should provide a way to chain multiple documents in a systematic way so that developers do not have to figure out what to do when a document is larger than 2 MB.
AH
Nov 20, 2024
Continuing to educate customers on how they can take better advantage of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB without having to completely rewrite their entire application paradigm would be beneficial. They can help them understand that there are multiple options to interact with it. They do not necessarily have to start from scratch. They can refactor their existing application to be able to use it better.
VS
Jan 3, 2023
I don't think Cosmos DB has improved our organization. People are using it, but I'm not sure it's the best solution. For one, it's costly. Also, there are other issues with it. You cannot get all the records simultaneously. You can only get it in chunks of 1,500 maximum.