UPDATED 00:44 EDT / APRIL 04 2016

NEWS

Microsoft’s DocumentDB gets into bed with MongoDB

If you’re fluent in MongoDB you might be interested to know that Microsoft’s recently launched take on the NoSQL database, DocumentDB, now supports drivers for the latter. Which means that if you have existing tools and libraries for MongoDB, you can now use them with DocumentDB, which resides entirely inside Microsoft’s Azure cloud.

One of the biggest advantages of this is that it’s now possible to build hybrid infrastructure using DocumentDB, together with a second database service that’s compatible with MongoDB.

Somewhat ironically, Microsoft used Parse as one example of how MongoDB support on DocumentDB works. Its demo slides reveal how apps powered by Parse can talk to DocumentDB using instructions from MongoDB, but the only problem is that Facebook recently announced it’s planning to shut down Parse. Still, that’s not a problem because it’s possible to move Parse servers to Azure, so everything’s still hunky-dory on that side.

MongoDB Inc. is also apparently very satisfied with last weekend’s announcement, if the comments of its director of product and market analysis Matt Keep are anything to go by.

“The biggest software company in the world is recognizing that relational databases are not suited to the demands of modern applications,” said Keep at Microsoft’s BUILD conference last week. “And that the document data model represents a superset of key-value, relational, wide-column and graph data models, and is therefore the most versatile technology on which to extend Microsoft’s database portfolio.”

If you’re unfamiliar with DocumentDB, the software is Microsoft’s own take on the JSON-based NoSQL database. DocumentDB was released without too much fanfare back in August 2014, and allows customers to choose different performance levels for each job they’re running on it. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it seems DocumentDB hasn’t attracted all that much attention, most likely because it was priced way too high – being far more expensive than Azure SQL or Table Storage in terms of reserved storage per dollar.

At BUILD, Microsoft said it would soon be altering DocumentDB’s pricing, but it didn’t say when those changes would happen or what they might be.

Besides MongoDB support, DocumentDB received another major boost when it got the ability to replicate data in multiple regions. The service was available in most Azure regions already, and now it looks like users can take advantage of that to construct an extremely responsive database across multiple geographic locations.

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