Microsoft has announced that the Azure DocumentDB database service is now generally available offering a fully managed NoSQL document database service that allows applications to query and process JSON data at scale. Microsoft has also released a new open source data migration tool to facilitate the movement of existing data from other database systems to DocumentDB.
DocumentDB is delivered as a fully managed database-as-a-service (DBaaS) with built in high availability, SQL query over indexed JSON and multi-document transaction processing. With the general availability announcement, DocumentDB is now offered in three purchase options - each with reserved performance, hourly billing and 99.95% availability. Performance levels provide a guaranteed, reserved level of throughput and request processing over high performance SSD based storage. Performance levels can be set through the Azure portal or one of the DocumentDB SDKs. Users can adjust performance levels at any point to meet the needs of an application and control the consumption of service capacity.
To simplify the migration process, Microsoft has added the DocumentDB Data Migration tool - an open source solution that imports data from a variety of sources, including JSON files, CSV files, SQL Server, MongoDB and existing DocumentDB collections. In addition to basic data import operations, the tool supports transforming tabular source data, such as SQL Server or CSV files, so that hierarchical relationships (subdocuments) can be created during import, as well as, options for handling date fields.
The migration tool source code is available on GitHub with a compiled version available from the Microsoft Download Center. Either compile the solution or download and extract the packaged version to a directory of choice.
Developers can get started now with Azure DocumentDB by using an existing Microsoft Azure subscription or by signing up for a free trial. DocumentDB offers a variety of SDKs including support for .Net, Node, Java and Python. The service also offers integrated support for other Azure data services including HDInsight and Azure Search.