Microsoft has made its NoSQL document database service, Azure DocumentDB, generally available as of April 8.
Microsoft announced plans for Azure DocumentDB last August and made a public preview of it available at that time.
Azure DocumentDB is meant to bridge NoSQL's document database functionality with the transactional capabilities of relational databases. The DocumentDB service natively supports JSON documents and makes available programming libraries for a number of languages and platforms, including .Net, Node.js, JavaScript and Python.
Azure DocumentDB uses the lock-free indexing technology developed by Microsoft Research and used in "Hekaton," the in-memory online-transaction-processing engine in SQL Server 2014.The DocumentDB service also offers integrated support for other Azure data services including HDInsight and Azure Search.
DocumentDB now supports three new purchase options (performance levels) and hourly billing for the standard pricing tier. The S1, S2, S3 options are available for about $25, $50 and $100 per month.