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Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pros and cons

Vendor: Microsoft
4.1 out of 5
Badge Ranked 1
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Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB offers excellent scalability, supporting various data models, automatic failover, and multi-region applications.
The platform features powerful real-time analytics capabilities, ensuring quick turnaround times crucial for applications like fraud detection.
Cosmos DB provides fast response times with large data sets, handling concurrency and consistency effectively.
The global synchronization and write capabilities across different regions enhance performance and availability significantly.
With autoscale and geo-replication, Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB allows automatic scaling and synchronization, simplifying configuration for multi-region support.

CONS

The query capabilities can be complex and lack flexibility, particularly for non-traditional use-cases. More options for crafting custom queries would be beneficial.
Integration with other platforms like Databricks is currently not possible, and better documentation on integration with other components is needed.
API compatibility has room for improvement, especially for MongoDB integration, with a need for richer query capabilities aligned with the latest MongoDB features.
Technical support can be slow, sometimes taking days to respond to tickets, and customer support is often inconsistent, even with premier agreements.
Pricing is complicated and expensive, with limitations such as the inability to retrieve all records simultaneously and costly data transfer from AWS.
 

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: November 2024.
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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.
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?
Joel Nation - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 9, 2024
Cosmos DB's greatest strengths are its easy setup and affordability, especially for those who understand its usage.
 

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: November 2024.
817,354 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.
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.
Joel Nation - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 9, 2024
The current data analytics of Cosmos DB is inefficient for large-scale queries due to its transactional design.