ComosDB: Offline Emulator
Azure Development using CosmosDB offline Emulator
Use Case: Your organization decides to move away from on-premise databases and decided to put their money on cloud-based data stores. Azure offers a No SQL database via Azure CosmosDB. Having and always running CosmosDB (even though with smaller RU) for Development purposes costs money. Hence Offline Emulator of CosmosDB helps in overcoming the cost challenges during development
Problem State: Your companies IT estate is unfortunately on Windows 7/8. Unfortunately, Microsoft states that for the emulator to work the software requirements would be Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, or Windows 10 with a 64-bit operating system.
Options
- Migrate Developer Machines to Windows 10
- Create a Windows VM via the Virtual Box or VM Player
- Provision Windows 10 VMs
- Install Offline Emulator on an existing Windows 2012/Windows 2016 server
I have selected the option # 4, which is much easier and can leverage the existing IT infrastructure
Download Location: CosmosDB emulator can be downloaded from here
Once downloaded install the emulator with admin credentials
In Windows search bar type CosmosDB and select Azure Cosmos DB Emulator as shown below
This is will start the cosmos emulator in the background. You can open the Emulator UI from the taskbar by clicking on the Open Data Explorer menu
Type https://localhost:8081/_explorer/index.html in the browser to access the CosmosDB
Select the Explorer icon on the left sidebar to Create the Database and containers
The below screens shows how I have used to insert around 1 million records into a PaidPriceData database with price data as container
The scale settings of emulator range from 400 -10,000 RU
The below image shows how I have used the connection string for local development.
More details Command-Line reference can be found invoking the command CosmosDB.Emulator.exe /help
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