The Microsoft folks continue to beaver away in PaaS-land, serving up new Platform as a Service offerings on a seemingly weekly basis.  One of the best of these is the new pay-as-you-go DocumentDB service; a fully managed, highly-scalable NoSQL (JSON) document database service that provides:

• Schema-free storage of arbitrary JSON documents
• Automatic indexing that supports complex queries
• Transaction support with ACID semantics
• Service-side programmability with JavaScript
• Write-optimized, SSD-backed and tunable via indexing & consistency
• Open-source Client SDKs for NET, Node.js, JavaScript and Python (with C++ and Java on the way)

DocumentDB should be thought of as a complement to SQL Server, Table Storage, Blobs, etc.; not a replacement.  It’s a pretty new offering, but even so, there’s a fair amount of related documentation around on the net:

• Azure Friday – DocDB w/Ryan CrawCour (101, 102)
• Azure Documentation – Tutorials & Guides
  • Introduction to Azure DocumentDB
  • Get started with DocumentDB
  • DocumentDB resource model and concepts
  • Develop an ASP.NET application with DocumentDB
  • DocumentDB .NET code samples
  • .NET SDK reference
  • REST API Reference
  • DocumentDB SQL reference
• Scott Gu – New DocumentDB NoSQL Service
• AzureConf – Azure Document Database Deep Dive

If you’re one of my fellow Neudesic-ies, I’ll be giving an in-depth DPG Presentation on the topic on Friday afternoon, at 1:00PM EST.  Please feel free to download my deck or clone the GitHub repository that contains the DpgDocDbDemo code that I’ll be showing in my talk.