Announced just yesterday, Azure DocumentDB received an update with a new quick start experience, backup and restore, and firewall support. DocumentDB is a distributed database service for managing JSON documents powered by Azure.
First and foremost in order to use any of these new features, you need to create a DocumentDB account.
Quick Start
The new quick start menu provides a more fluid experience. With your new DocumentDB account, you can use the quick start menu to jump right into creating a personalized ready-to-run sample app in a manner of seconds. (see here for accounts with MongoDB API support).
Backup and Restore
For backup and restore, DocumentDB now allows scaling throughput across multiple Azure datacenters using muli-homing APIs. DomumentDB offers a 99.99 availability SLAs (service level agreements), and all of the writes in DocumentDB are stored many times over in a local data center as well as replicated across all locations within your DocumentDB account.
Addtiionally, DocumentDB regularly backsup your data at continuously. The backups are stored without hindering performance or your database operations availability. All DocumentDB backups are stored separately in another storage device and then are further replicated globally to avoid interruption by regional disasters. In order to restore databases and collections from a backup, you’ll have to contact Azure support.
Firewall Support
DocumentDB added this firewall support by popular demand, adding IP filter and firewall rules support for DocumentDB and MongoDB APIs. You can now adjust your DocumentDB account to allow web traffic only from a specific list of individual IP address and/or IP address ranges. Once the new IP designation is applied to your DocumentDB account, all requests from IP addresses outside of the sanctioned lists would be blocked by DocumentDB. Read more information on DocumentDB firewall support.
Expanded geospatial support
Lastly, the new DocumentDB update brought expanded geospatial support; specifically geospatial indexing and querying of Polygon and LineString objects. DocumentDB can auto-detect GeoJSON fragments that contain Polygon and LineString objects in your documents and quickly index them for efficient spatial proximity queries.
Polygon and LineString objects spatial proximity querying is often used for “geo-fences,” used in IoT, telematics, gaming, and mobile apps. Go here for technical information about geospatial support in DocumentDB.
Tell the Azure DocumentDB team how they’re doing and what other features you’d like to see using UserVoice, StackOverflow #azure-documentdb, or via Twitter @DocumentDB.
