The very first product of Hibernating Rhinos was a profiler for NHibernate, to allow you to figure out exactly what is going between your database and application. Now I’m proud to present our latest product: the Cosmos DB Profiler.

If you are using Azure, you are likely familiar with Cosmos DB. Cosmos DB is not a traditional relational database. It is marketed by Microsoft as a multi model database and it is widely known in the world of distributed databases. The first part is important enough to bear repeating. Cosmos DB is not a relational database, even if there is a tendency to treat it as such.

We have gathered everything we know about optimal database usage, mixed in all the experience we run into seeing users bump into issue working with distributed systems and then looked into all the best practices published about successful Cosmos DB applications. After we had all of that, we looked into patterns, things that we can do for you, automatically, that would prevent you from messing up. Thus, the Cosmos DB profiler was born.

Here is how it looks like, profiling an application locally:

As you can see, it give you context to the interaction between your application and the database. It allows you to see exactly what is going on behind the scenes. This is important, since most Cosmos DB applications aren’t trivial, we are usually talking about big applications with a lot of data and moving pieces. It can be hard to understand what is actually going on when you run a particular action.

Furthermore, the profiler is able to give you concrete suggestions that will improve your performance and reduce you cloud bills.

The pricing model for Cosmos DB is based on provisioned capacity, and it is very easy to get into a state where you need to provision a lot more than what you expected to need. The profiler is able to detect such issues, provide you with concrete recommendations on how to fix them and show you the savings, immediately.

I’m doing a webinar on the Cosmos DB profiler on Tuesday and I would love to see you there.