Transactional JavaScript Stored Procedures in Cosmos DB with Kevin Hazzard

Our August 2018 meeting was a hit. Blaize delivered an excellent presentation on Cosmos DB. My only regret was that we couldn’t have another hour of his time and several of you have contacted me and said the same. For September, I’ve decided to continue the theme and bring a related topic that’s near and dear to my heart: Cosmos DB stored procedures written in JavaScript that are implicitly transactional. As I tell my peers all the time: JavaScript is perhaps the worst programming language ever created and one of the very best. The terrible, hot mess that is JavaScript in the web browser isn’t the same JavaScript we know and love in Node.js, for example. In Node, the JavaScript experience is somewhat bounded and guided by conventions and excellent, stable server-side libraries. That makes the programming language rather pleasant to work with. The same is true of Cosmos DB stored procedures. JavaScript written in Cosmos DB is restricted and guided by some core principles that make it elegant. In this code-focused session, we’ll talk about those principles and the coding practices you’ll want to adopt to be productive in this environment. Even if you aren’t using Cosmos DB yet, I believe you’ll get a lot out of the discussion. And I promise to bring you all a non-Cosmos DB talk in October. 😉