The First Look series focusses on new products, recent announcements, previews or things I have not had the time to provide a first look at and serves as introduction to the subject. First look posts are fairly short and high level.
In this First Look: Azure DocumentDB. DocumentDB is a NoSQL document database service designed for mobile / web applications. Since it is a NoSQL database it is a schema-free system it allows flexible storage and processing of data with scale up and down on demand, while still allowing easy querying using a SQL dialect. As such it operates in the same space as other NoSQL systems such as Cassandra, MongoDB, HBase and CouchDB and provides a feature-rich, cost effective and enterprise ready solution.
Development against DocumentDB can be done using .NET, Node.js, JavaScript and Python. On top of this DocumentDB provides a SQL Query language and it is elastically scalable both on throughput and storage.
More info is available at http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/documentdb-introduction/.
More to come!