Azure CosmosDB - Download all documents in collection to local directory

Question

I am trying to download all the documents in my cosmosDB collection to a local directory. I want to modify a few things in all of the JSON documents using python, then upload them to another Azure account. What is the simplest, fastest way to download all of the documents in my collection? Should I use the CosmosDB emulator? I've been told to check out Azure's data factory? Would that help with downloading files locally? I've also been referred to CosmosDB's data migration tool and I saw that it facilitates import data to CosmosDB but I can't find much on exporting. I have about 6GB of Json files in my collection.

Thanks.

Answer 1

In the past I've used the DocumentDb (CosmosDb) Data Migration Tool which is available for download from Microsoft.

When running the app you need to specify source and target as in the screenshot below

Make sure that you choose to Import from DocumentDb and specify the connection string and collection you want to export from. If you want to dump the entire contents of your collection the query would just be

SELECT * FROM c

Then under the Target Information you can choose a JSON file which will be saved to your local hard drive. You're free to modify the contents of that file in any way and then use it as Source Information later when you're ready to import it back to another collection.

Answer 2

I used the migration tool and found that it is great if you have a reasonably sized db as it does use processing and bandwidth for a considerable period. I had to chunk a 10GB db and that took too long so ended up using Data Lake Analytics to transfer via script to SQL server and Blob Storage. It gives you a lot of flexibility to transform the data and store either in Data Lake of other distributed systems. As well if needed it helps if you are using cosmos for staging and need to run the data through any cleaning algorithms.

The other advantages are that you can set up batching and you get a lot of processing stats to determine how to optimize large data transformations. Hope this helps. Cheers.