AZ-204 Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure Exam

Implement CRUD Operations Using the Cosmos DB SDK

Working with Azure Cosmos DB through its SDK starts by creating a CosmosClient instance. From this client, you obtain a Database object and then a Container object to perform various operations. Methods like CreateDatabaseIfNotExistsAsync and CreateContainerIfNotExistsAsync help automate resource provisioning without manual steps in the Azure portal. This approach promotes consistency and repeatability across different environments. Automating these tasks makes it easier to manage your data infrastructure efficiently.

When you create a container, you configure important settings that impact performance and cost.

• Partition Key: Defines how data is sharded across physical partitions for even load distribution.
• Indexing Policy: Specifies which paths to index to balance read and write performance.
• Throughput (RUs): Sets your budget for request units, which you can scale up or down.
  Fine-tuning these options ensures optimal performance and cost control. Understanding how each setting affects your workload helps you design scalable solutions.

Performing CRUD operations on container items involves a few straightforward SDK calls. Using these methods, you can integrate data access directly into your application code.

• CreateItemAsync: Inserts new documents into a container.
• ReadItemAsync / QueryItemsAsync: Retrieves items by ID or using SQL-like queries.
• ReplaceItemAsync (or upsert): Updates existing documents with optimistic concurrency.
• DeleteItemAsync: Removes documents when they are no longer needed.
  These operations support atomic interactions that preserve data consistency and integrity.

To achieve the best performance and reliability, you should optimize settings beyond basic CRUD calls. Consider consistency levels to balance latency and data freshness.

• Strong, Session, Eventual: Different levels trade off between strict consistency and lower latency.
• Bulk Operations: Use batch or bulk APIs to reduce network overhead for large data sets.
• Time-to-Live (TTL): Automatically expire stale data to control storage growth.
  Configuring these options thoughtfully helps maintain high throughput and predictable costs. Leveraging these features makes your application more robust and scalable.

Conclusion

In summary, using the Azure Cosmos DB SDK allows you to manage containers and items programmatically with CRUD operations, resource automation, and performance tuning. By configuring partition keys, indexing policies, and throughput, you can control how data is stored and accessed. Employing methods like CreateItemAsync, ReadItemAsync, and DeleteItemAsync ensures that your application can maintain data integrity. Finally, optimizing consistency levels, bulk operations, and Time-to-Live settings helps you build cost-effective and scalable solutions on Azure.