Azure Cosmos DB vs PostGIS

Azure Cosmos DB vs PostGIS: What are the differences?

Azure Cosmos DB: A fully-managed, globally distributed NoSQL database service. Azure DocumentDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service built for fast and predictable performance, high availability, elastic scaling, global distribution, and ease of development; PostGIS: Open source spatial database. PostGIS is a spatial database extender for PostgreSQL object-relational database. It adds support for geographic objects allowing location queries to be run in SQL.

Azure Cosmos DB and PostGIS are primarily classified as "NoSQL Database as a Service" and "Database" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Azure Cosmos DB are:

• Fully managed with 99.99% Availability SLA
• Elastically and highly scalable (both throughput and storage)
• Predictable low latency: <10ms @ P99 reads and <15ms @ P99 fully-indexed writes

On the other hand, PostGIS provides the following key features:

• Processing and analytic functions for both vector and raster data for splicing, dicing, morphing, reclassifying, and collecting/unioning with the power of SQL
• raster map algebra for fine-grained raster processing
• Spatial reprojection SQL callable functions for both vector and raster data

"Best-of-breed NoSQL features" is the primary reason why developers consider Azure Cosmos DB over the competitors, whereas "De facto GIS in SQL" was stated as the key factor in picking PostGIS.

PostGIS is an open source tool with 645 GitHub stars and 246 GitHub forks. Here's a link to PostGIS's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, PostGIS has a broader approval, being mentioned in 53 company stacks & 15 developers stacks; compared to Azure Cosmos DB, which is listed in 24 company stacks and 24 developer stacks.