SQL Queries in Azure Cosmos DB - Part 1

Azure Cosmos DB - Brief Introduction

Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model database service, like document, graph, key-value, and column store, NoSQL from Microsoft. In Azure Cosmos DB case, we can interpret NoSQL to not only SQL because it provides a SQL API that we can use to query JSON-formatted documents stored in Cosmos DB using SQL queries.

Azure Cosmos DB supports various APIs which users can use to perform operations on their data. These APIs are as following:

1. SQL API: This API is used to interact with the document database for JSON data.
2. MongoDB API: MongoDB applications can use this API to interact with Azure Cosmos DB.
3. Table API: This API supports Azure table storage operations.
4. Gremlin API: This API is useful to interact with graph data.
5. Cassandra API: Apache Cassandra applications can use this API to interact with data stored in Azure Cosmos DB.

In this article, we'll see the queries used in Azure Cosmos DB SQL API and how to use Structured Query Language (SQL) as it’s one of the most familiar and known query languages.