I was very excited about the announcement of a DocumentDB emulator!

I could finally explore the magic of this new document-based database (I can’t say “NoSQL” as it supports a SQL dialect) without spending money just to explore the database (it was a “pay to play”).

However, it’s not to be for me:

1. Worst: It supports requests from LOCALHOST only. Its ports are bound to 127.0.0.1 rather than 0.0.0.0, thus preventing it from being usable from other machines. I wanted to install this on an always-on PC in our house rather than install it on my home workstation. I can sort of see why they want to limit it, but come-on, this is for development purposes. It’s not set up for availability, performance, etc. One simple right click of the app-tray icon resets and clears all the data. There are a number of effective ways for making it developer only — and I wouldn’t have picked this one.
2. It has constantly used CPU, even when it’s not being used. On my laptop for example, it was hovering around 10-15% CPU, even when there were zero active connections. This problem isn’t consistent as I installed it on a secondary workstation and it’s using a lot of RAM (nearly 400MB), but only 1% CPU.
3. It’s Windows only. This is actually a minor point if you’re using Windows, but if you want to use a Mac and do development, even with a VM hosted emulator, you won’t be able to.

So, for the best experience with DocumentDB, you’ll likely need to stick with the pay-to-play option of hosting it in Azure. I’m disappointed. I’ll look for a different database … something that doesn’t have this limitation.

Bummer.