Microsoft has been providing (in opinion) the best cloud platform for developers for quite a while, and their newest preview feature (DocumentDB) continues to add features modern developers have been asking for. Azure’s DocumentDB is a NoSQL document database service that supports JSON document storage and rich, native JavaScript query support. I’ll spend the next posts reviewing the new DocumentDB features of Azure, so stay tuned.
Creating your first DocumentDB
To create a DocumentDB, go to the new Azure Preview Portal at http://portal.azure.com. I haven’t found a way to manage your DocumentDB databases from the old Azure portal, so be sure you are using the Azure Preview portal.
Click on “New” and the select “DocumentDB” from the menu:
The portal will begin to create your new DocumentDB and prompt you with several options. Complete the following:
- Enter the name of your database
- Choose a pricing tier (Standard is the only available option for the Preview)
- Select an “Optional Configuration” (this allows you to scale your database with regards to storage space and reserved throughput. By default you allocate 1 capacity unit, giving you 10GB of storage space)
- Select a resource group (if you’re not familiar with Resource Groups, check out http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/azure-preview-portal-using-resource-groups/)
- Select a location for the DocumentDB (West US, North Europe, and West Europe are the only available options at this time; however, more locations will eventually become available)
- Press Create and wait for the DocumentDB to be created. This should only take a few minutes – the Brosteins database took approximately 2 minutes to be provisioned.
Clicking on the Brosteins database opens up a new journey showing me the database is online and ready to be used.
Stay Tuned
I’ll continue to blog on using Azure’s DocumentDB preview over the next few weeks as I explore connecting to the database, querying, persisting data, and indexing. Stay tuned.
