Shulou(Shulou.com)06/01 Report--

When it comes to Microsoft and database, many people may first think of SQL Server, but the protagonist we are talking about today is not it, but Cosmos DB. In China, there may not be many people who know Cosmos DB, and Microsoft China has hardly promoted it, but it has a strong momentum abroad, so let's talk about it today.

Cosmos DB is a cloud database service established by Microsoft in 2010 and officially released in May 2017 after seven years of research and development. The database service supports a variety of data models such as graph data, column storage, key-value storage and document database, as well as strong consistency and final consistency.

In just a few months, Cosmos DB has been growing, and according to the DB-Engines ranking, Cosmos DB has climbed from 58th to 31st, up 27 places. Surpass Google BigQuery and AWS Redshift and approach AWS DynamoDB.

▲ data comes from DB-Engines

If you take a closer look, the two competitors, AWS and Microsoft, are very different in the way they handle cloud databases. AWS provides a variety of different types of cloud database products for users to choose from, such as relational database (Aurora / RDS), data warehouse (Redshift), in-memory database (ElastiCache), graphical database (Neptune) and NoSQL (DynamoDB). Microsoft, on the other hand, takes an one-size-fits-all approach and claims to be suitable for all general-purpose databases.

Cloud Database will be the New Battlefield of Cloud Competition

At present, most of the data is still stored in traditional relational databases, and the status of Oracle,MySQL and SQL Server, which rank in the top three of DB-Engines, is still unbreakable. Although NoSQL has begun to change this (MongoDB is the best example), the database is still the most difficult to change in the enterprise infrastructure, and the hardest thing to go to IOE is O, which is an accepted fact because there are too many risks involved in changing the database.

To avoid risk, companies may avoid doing business with weak NoSQL startups, but they can't avoid doing business with giants like AWS and Microsoft.

However, although Oracle,MySQL and SQL Server are indisputably dominant, the rapid rise of cloud databases is already a fact, and is still growing rapidly. For example, like AWS DynamoDB and Azure Cosmos DB. Although Oracle is more than 100 times more popular than Cosmos in terms of DB-Engines, there is no denying that these cloud databases dominate new applications born in the cloud.

This is important, and as Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman says, the shift from a private cloud to a public cloud environment is obvious and accelerating: "New things tend to go into public clouds, while traditional businesses tend to private clouds, but new things are growing faster."

The gap is still large, with data showing that public clouds have a 20-fold growth rate while private data centers have only three times the growth rate. Of course, for now, these new cloud databases may be dwarfed by the enterprise's old applications and systems, but that won't last long.

It is worth noting that among these cloud database players, Cosmos DB has surpassed other cloud database competitors. In particular, it has recently overtaken Google BigQuery and AWS Redshift. Although there is still a long way to go to surpass AWS DynamoDB, at the current growth rate, it is entirely possible to achieve it.

What are the advantages of Cosmos DB?

The following chart, released by Microsoft, lists Cosmos DB, AWS Dynamo DB and Google Cloud Spanner. In this comparison chart, Cosmos DB stands out for its multi-model and multi-API support, global distribution, consistency model, centralized management, and SLA.

The rapid growth of Cosmos DB may be due to a decline in developers' interest in "diversity persistence". The so-called "diversity persistence" was proposed by Thoughtworks's Martin Fowler in 2011, which roughly means that "any enterprise of a certain size will have different data storage technologies for different types of data, rather than forcing the data to conform to the relational data model."

For example, for an enterprise, some parts of its application may be stored in a distributed database such as Apache Cassandra, partly in a graphical database Neo4j, and partly in a relational database such as PostgreSQL. The popularity of databases such as MongoDB is a clear sign that we do live in an increasingly diverse world.

The outstanding advantage of Cosmos DB is that developers may want to have a universal database. Because giving them more choices will only make their work more complicated and difficult. Because of the ability to support a variety of data, Cosmos DB can act as both a graphical database, a NoSQL database, a column database, and so on. As InfoWorld's Serdar Yegulalp said, "Microsoft does not provide a specific database. It is a general-purpose backend for different types of databases."

This makes it much cheaper for developers to learn and make their work easier. Of course, there is a risk that Cosmos DB is comprehensive, that is, for all applications, it is not the best tool for specific work. After all, a comprehensive database will make people feel that everything is mediocre. However, judging from the popularity of Cosmos DB on DB-Engines, developers don't seem to look at it from this perspective yet.

In any case, at least for now, all this indicates that the battle for cloud databases in 2018 will be between the two companies, Amazon and Microsoft. At the just-passed AWS Re:Invent 2017 conference, AWS released a large number of new database services and feature upgrades, each corresponding to a separate product. By contrast, Microsoft has only upgraded Cosmos DB to add some features.

In the end, it will be up to the developers to decide who will win the war of cloud databases. But we believe that 2018 will be a year of fierce competition for cloud databases, and other players will follow suit. In China, we have seen many players release new self-research database services one after another.

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