We already know that Azure DocumentDB was used in the back-end of OneNote. Last week Microsoft released another nice case study: the user profiles for MSN portal.

The requirements for the solution were:

1. Scale requirements to support +425M unique MSN users with +100M direct authenticated users. Initial capacity requirements for 20TB of document storage.
2. Under 15ms write latency and single digit read latencies for 99% requests.
3. Authorization scopes across the same underlying data.
4. Schema free storage with rich query and transaction support.
5. Data model extensions to support the diverse set of verticals schemas.
6. Hadoop based analytics on top of the data.
7. Available globally to serve all MSN markets and users.

Here we see the typical requirements leading to a NoSQL solution:

• Data volume
• Read / Write performance
• Schema free

On top of those typical requirements, Azure DocumentDB offers the atypical rich querying without pre-configuration.

Look at this case study. You might recognize some pattern in a solution you are working on. If that is so, you might want to look into Azure DocumentsDB.