At its Build conference in May, Microsoft took the wraps off Cosmos DB, the new incarnation of its existing cloud-based Azure DocumentDB NoSQL database. With a nod to the dramatic, Microsoft terms Cosmos DB as its biggest database bet since SQL Server; it is positioning it as its flagship cloud database, suited for use cases ranging from security and fraud detection, to IoT (consumer and industrial), personalization, e-commerce, gaming, social networks, chats, messaging, bots, oil and gas recovery and refining, and smart utility grids.
Cosmos DB is a good example of how cloud platform providers are rethinking databases for scalable, elastic environments and commodity infrastructure. The platform that is most comparable is Google Cloud Spanner, but each of these databases is engineered for different purposes: Cosmos DB as a globally distributed operational database and Spanner as a globally distributed SQL-supporting OLTP database.