--- title: "A Technical Overview of Azure Cosmos DB" publication: "DB Weekly" issue: 213 published_at: "2018-07-20" canonical_url: "https://dbweekly.com/issues/213" --- This week's database news #213 — July 20, 2018 [Read on the Web](https://dbweekly.com/issues/213) Database Weekly [![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60/rldntazrtovodhjf77mq.jpg)](https://developers.soundcloud.com/blog/keeping-counts-in-sync) [Keeping Play Counts In Sync on SoundCloud](https://developers.soundcloud.com/blog/keeping-counts-in-sync) — _“what might seem like a simple counting system is actually a cornucopia of services”_ .. and it involves Cassandra, HDFS, memcached, and Kafka! Interesting to see the dataflows in a high scale service like SoundCloud. SoundCloud [Python Gains Traction Among Data Scientists](https://www.datanami.com/2018/07/19/python-gains-traction-among-data-scientists/) — Though that’s not the whole story with R preferred in the retail sector and SAS in healthcare. Datanami ▶[A Technical Overview of Azure Cosmos DB](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl-rBYBd9q0) — Azure Cosmos DB is one of the more interesting databases of recent years, being a highly scalable _multi-model_ database. It’s Azure only, though there [is a local emulator](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/local-emulator). Microsoft Developer [![\](https://copm.s3.amazonaws.com/ef5f8d82.png)](https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/atlas/mongodb-google-cloud?jmp=cpress&utm_campaign=WW_CP_newsletter_sponsorship_FY19Q1&utm_content=20180720&utm_medium=display&utm_source=dbweekly) [Now Available: MongoDB Atlas Free Tier on Google Cloud Platform](https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/atlas/mongodb-google-cloud?jmp=cpress&utm_campaign=WW_CP_newsletter_sponsorship_FY19Q1&utm_content=20180720&utm_medium=display&utm_source=dbweekly) — At MongoDB World 2018, Google Cloud Platform and MongoDB announced the general availability of MongoDB Atlas's free replica sets on GCP. Get your free 3-node replica set today. MONGODB sponsor [Gracefully Scaling to 10k PostgreSQL Connections for Cheap](https://medium.com/futuretech-industries/ten-thousand-high-availability-postgresql-connections-for-35-mo-part-one-4b7a2d61c51e) — A now-complete three part series ([part 2](https://medium.com/futuretech-industries/postgres-raffle-10k-connections-35-mo-part-two-b4c2e0c86e37) and [part 3](https://medium.com/futuretech-industries/gracefully-scaling-to-10k-postgresql-connections-for-35-mo-part-three-3a780eed72cf)) on how a team of engineers have scaled PostgreSQL using PgBouncer and Kubernetes. Alexander H. Black [Why Blockchains Don’t Suck, and the Perils of Distributed Databases](https://medium.com/@mycoralhealth/why-blockchains-dont-suck-and-the-perils-of-distributed-databases-1a522cc7cfe1) — Hello, controversial post alert :-) _“The aim of this post was to present a counterpoint to the mid-2018 trend of slamming blockchain technologies.”_ Coral Health [Google Compute Now Has 'ultramem' Machine Types with 4TB RAM](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/07/now-shipping-ultramem-machine-types-with-up-to-4tb-of-ram.html) — Up to 160 vCPUs (a record for a public cloud) and 4TB of memory on a single instance are now available. Unsurprisingly, SAP workloads are a target for such scale. Google [New Amazon EC2 Instance Types Announced: Z1d, R5 and R5d](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-ec2-instance-update-faster-processors-and-more-memory/) — The new instance types are all compute or memory optimized with Z1d instances optimized for the highest per-core performance and the R5 and R5d instances aimed at databases and analytics use. Jeff Barr (AWS) [MapD's GPU-Powered Database Now Available in Google Cloud's Marketplace](https://www.datanami.com/2018/07/19/mapd-gpu-powered-database-now-available-in-google-clouds-marketplace/) — GPU-powered database MapD is now available through the Google Cloud Launcher. Datanami [Studio 3T Adds SQL Joins Wizardry To Its MongoDB IDE](https://studio3t.com/knowledge-base/articles/create-mongodb-joins-with-sql/?utm_source=studio3t&utm_medium=cooper&utm_campaign=july2018) — Transfer your SQL skills to the new enterprise database, read: “How to Create MongoDB Joins Using SQL.” Studio 3T sponsor [How SQL DISTINCT and ORDER BY are Related](https://blog.jooq.org/2018/07/13/how-sql-distinct-and-order-by-are-related/) Lukas Eder [AWS Kinesis with Lambdas: Lessons Learned at Scale at Trivago](https://tech.trivago.com/2018/07/13/aws-kinesis-with-lambdas-lessons-learned/) — Trivago built a serverless pipeline to replicate data stored in on-premise MySQL machines to AWS. Trivago [Uniting SQL and NoSQL for Monitoring: Why PostgreSQL Is The Ultimate Data Store for Prometheus](https://blog.timescale.com/sql-nosql-data-storage-for-prometheus-devops-monitoring-postgresql-timescaledb-time-series-3cde27fd1e07?source=rss------database-5&gi=9b4b69a9f995) Niksa Jakovljevic [HuskyDB: Windows Native C++ NoSQL Database](https://github.com/petergramenides/huskydb) — A lightweight document-oriented database optimized for Windows. Peter Gramenides [Redisson: A Redis-Based Java In-Memory Data Grid](https://redisson.org/) Redisson [kafka_fdw: Apache Kafka Foreign Database Wrapper for Postgres](https://github.com/adjust/kafka_fdw) — Want to query Kafka directly from Postgres? This FDW allows you to treat a Kafka stream like a Postgres table. adjust A **[Cooperpress](https://cooperpress.com/)** publication. 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