Azure Cosmos DB Cheat Sheet

• Globally distributed database that supports NoSQL.
• A fully-managed database service with turnkey global distribution and transparent multi-master replication.

Features

• Cosmos DB offers encryption at rest.
• It replicates every partition across all the regions.
• CosmosDB offers single-digit millisecond reads and writes in all regions.

• Supports automatic failover during a regional outage.
• Consistency Levels: Strong, Bounded Staleness, Session, Consistent Prefix, and Eventual
• You can set either standard (manual) or autoscale provisioned throughput on your databases and containers.
• Monitor both the provisioned autoscale max RU/s and the current throughput (RU/s) of the system with Azure Monitor metrics.
• Partition Merge feature allows you to combine partitions to optimize performance and cost, addressing the “hot partition” problem.
• Priority-Based Execution lets you prioritize critical requests by setting throughput priority levels for queries and operations.
• Azure Synapse Link for Cosmos DB enables near real-time analytics by automatically syncing operational data to a columnar store without impacting performance.
• Integrated Cache provides a dedicated, in-memory cache for read-heavy workloads to improve performance and reduce request unit (RU) consumption.

Consistency Levels

• Strong – reads are guaranteed to return the most recent committed version of an item.
• Bounded Staleness – is for low write latencies but requires a total global order guarantee.
• Session – reads are guaranteed to honor the consistent-prefix, monotonic reads, monotonic writes, read-your-writes, and write-follows-reads guarantees.
• Consistent Prefix – updates that are returned will contain some prefix of all the updates.
• Eventual – has no ordering guarantee for reads.

Security

• Encryption at rest is applied automatically.
• Uses AES-256 encryption in all regions.
• You can use the keys that are managed by Microsoft or customer-managed keys.
• Two types of keys to authenticate users:
  • Master Keys for administrative resources.
  • Resources Tokens for application resources.
• Detect suspicious activities which indicate unusual and potentially harmful attempts to access or exploit databases with Advanced Threat Protection.

Integration and Development

• Materialized Views (Preview) allow you to define pre-computed aggregations for complex queries, significantly improving query performance on large datasets.

• vCore-based Provisioning Model offers a new compute and storage pricing option designed for MongoDB workloads, providing simpler scaling and cost predictability.

• Continuous Backup with Point-in-Time Restore enables automated, granular backups allowing you to restore your data to any moment within the last 30 days.

Azure Cosmos DB Pricing

• Elastically scale the provisioned throughput and storage for your databases according to your needs and only pay for the throughput and storage needed.
• Cosmos DB throughput per second and request unit consumption varies by operation and JSON document.
• Additional backup copies will be billed as total GBs of data stored (first two copies are free).
• You provision the number of RUs for your application on a per-second basis in increments of 100 RUs per second. You are billed on an hourly basis.
• With autoscale for containers, you pay per hour for the highest RU/s that the system scaled up to within the hour.
• The new vCore-based model for MongoDB separates compute and storage costs for more predictable billing.
• Serverless capacity mode is now generally available, offering cost-effective pricing for variable or low-throughput workloads where you pay per request.

Azure SQL Database vs Cosmos DB:

https://tutorialsdojo.com/azure-sql-database-vs-cosmos-db/

Technical Overview and Unique Features of Azure Cosmos DB

Validate Your Knowledge

Question 1

Question Type: Single-choice

Note: This item is part of a series of questions with the exact same scenario but with a different proposed answer. Each one in the series has a unique solution that may, or may not, comply with the requirements specified in the scenario.

Your company plans to deploy several virtual machines that will host its business-critical application to Azure.

You need to recommend a solution to ensure that if a single data center fails, the application will not be affected.

Solution: Deploy virtual machines to multiple resource groups with the same availability zone.

Does this meet the goal?

1. Yes
2. No

For more Azure practice exam questions with detailed explanations, check out the Tutorials Dojo Portal:

Azure Cosmos DB Cheat Sheet Resources:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/introduction
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/cosmos-db/