On day one of its
Build 2017 developer conference in Seattle, a new globally distributed database referred to as Azure Cosmos DB was introduced by
Microsoft, which is considered a superset of Microsoft's existing NoSQL DocumentDB service.
In order to power planet-scale cloud services and applications, Microsoft calls Cosmos DB a database. Some of its features are it is schema free in addition to being a multi-model database. Key-value, documents, graphs and columnar data types are some of its additional features.
The variety of application programming interfaces (APIs) for accessing that data include MongoDB, DocumentDB SQL, Gremlin (preview) and Azure Tables (preview is also supported). By providing a single image of the database for deployment in Azure datacenters across the world, Cosmos DB makes global distribution turnkey.
By adding support for the two most prominent open source databases to its managed relational database platform, the company previews Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL.