Microsoft announces brand new “Cosmos DB Explorer”

Today Microsoft announced the “Cosmos DB Explorer,” currently in public preview.

With “Cosmos DB Explorer” you can work with your Cosmos DB directly in a web app and share query-results with 3rd parties.

For quite some time, you have been able to use the “Data Explorer” inside the Azure Portal, but with “Cosmos DB Explorer” you do not need access to the Azure Portal, and you can connect to Cosmos DB using connection strings.

What about the competition?

The closest competitor to CosmosDB is DynamoDB (and its in-memory cousin DAX) from Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS DynamoDB has had the  “Tables” tool inside the AWS Console for several years now. In the ‘Tables‘ tool, you can work with DynamyDB ‘tables’ and ‘items.’ You can also to some quite advanced things like Lambda ‘triggers’ and capacity planning.

The “Cosmos DB Explorer” has adopted similar features, and hence also has built-in support for stored procedures, user-defined functions, and triggers, as well as capacity planning (scaling).

It will be very exciting to see how “Cosmos DB Explorer” will stack up against the management facilities for AWS DynamoDB. “Cosmos DB Explorer” already looks like a very capable solution, and I’m sure that it will help increase the reach of CosmosDB even more.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below.