Microsoft's DocumentDB lets its MongoDB freak flag fly

Microsoft has extended access to its NoSQL-based DocumentDB to MongoDB in preview.

DocumentDB was released in preview about a year and half ago. It's available on Microsoft's Azure platform, and MongoDB is already supported on Azure, but the twain were unable to meet, until now.

Users are now able to access the MongoDB-to-DocumentDB preview programme, though interested parties must have subscribed to Azure, through the Azure Portal dashboard, where they can click through to Protocol Support for MongoDB.

Redmond's attempt at creating a NoSQL document-focused database had initially received little fanfare – it was, and is, more expensive than Azure SQL and Table Storage in terms of reserved storage per dollar.

Microsoft hinted at Build that it would be altering the price of DocumentDB, though there is no information on what the change will be.

The company didn’t go into much detail at Microsoft Build today, so it’s going to be interesting to see if DocumentDB is getting cheaper or can work for bigger customers.

Mat Keep, MongoDB's director of product and market analysis, said this created "significant opportunity" for MongoDB.

“The biggest software company in the world is recognising that relational databases are not suited to the demands of modern applications. And that the document data model represents a superset of key-value, relational, wide-column and graph data models, and is therefore the most versatile technology on which to extend Microsoft’s database portfolio,” he said in a statement. ®