Microsoft has announced it is bringing the Azure DocumentDB SDK to the Xamarin mobile platform. In a blog post today, the company says the integration gives users easier access to DocumentDB. Now customers can interact directly with DocumentDB from their mobile apps, without a middle-tier.
Azure DocumentDB is Microsoft’s low latency, NoSQL database. It brings JavaScript and SQL for virtual machine-based cloud databases to globally distributed applications. It is well suited to act as a cloud database for mobile apps, which need to store data in the cloud.
With DocumentDB, users have a fully managed NoSQL database as a service. It is scalable on demand and customers can access data anywhere. Introducing the solution to Xamarin, removes the need to work through Azure, with users able to directly access DocumentDB in bridging solution.
Among the features now available in Xamarin are the ability grow data size and requests. Microsoft says users can grow to millions of requests per second. Data is saved as schemaless JSON documents. This allows DocumentDB in Xamarin to work fast.
Microsoft has detailed all the features:
- Rich queries over schemaless data. DocumentDB stores data as schemaless JSON documents in heterogeneous collections, and offers rich and fast queries without the need to worry about schema or indexes.
- Guaranteed. It takes only few milliseconds to read and write documents with DocumentDB. Developers can specify the throughput they need and DocumentDB will honor it with 99.99% SLA.
- Limitless Scale. Your DocumentDB collections will grow as your app grows. You can start with small data size and 100s requests per second and grow to arbitrarily large, 10s and 100s of millions requests per second throughput, and petabytes of data.
- Globally Distributed. Your mobile app users are on the go, often across the world. DocumentDB is a globally distributed database, and with just one click on a map it will bring the data wherever your users are.
- Built-in rich authorization. With DocumentDB you can easy to implement popular patterns like per-user data, or multi-user shared data without custom complex authorization code.
- Geo-spatial queries. Many mobile apps offer geo-contextual experiences today. With the first class support for geo-spatial types DocumentDB makes these experiences very easy to accomplish.
- Binary attachments. Your app data often includes binary blobs. Native support for attachments makes it easier to use DocumentDB as one-stop shop for your app data.
Xamarin
Last year, Microsoft purchased Xamarin as part of its move to make all toolkits iOS exclusive. Since then, the service has become the umbrella for the company’s bridging tools to help developers port apps to Windows platforms.
The service gives developer tools to create iOS, Android, and Windows 10 universal UI. This is achieved through a shared C# codebase. The idea is it gives dev’s an easy way to port their existing apps to Microsoft’s services.
