Introduction to Azure Cosmos DB

Abstract

The database space has been greatly dominated by relational database management systems (or RDBMSs) such as Microsoft® SQL Server or Oracle. This dominance was made possible in part by the wide range of solutions that can be built on top of those systems but also because of the powerful products that are available. There is, however, a different approach to data management, commonly known as NoSQL. The term NoSQL stands for ``non SQL'' or ``not only SQL'' since SQL (Structured Query Language) is almost exclusively tied to relational systems. NoSQL databases have existed since the 1960s but it wasn't until the early 2000s that they gained a lot of popularity with companies like Facebook and Amazon implementing them and products such as MongoDB, Cassandra, and Redis becoming the choices for many developers.