Date function and Selecting top N queries in DocumentDB

Question

I have following questions regarding Azure DocumentDB

• According to this article, multiple functions have been added to DocumentDB. Is there any way to get Date functions working? How can i get the queries of type greater than some date working?
• Is there any way to select top N results like 'Select top 10 * from users'?
• According to Document playground , Order By will be supported in future. Is ther any other way around for now?

The application that I am developing requires certain number of results to be displayed that have been inserted recently. I need these functionalities within a stored procedure. The documents that I am storing in DocumentDB have a DateTime property. I require the above mentioned functionalities for my application to work. I have searched at documentation and samples. Please help if you know of any workaround.

Answer 1

Some thoughts/suggestions below:

• Please take a look at this idea on how to store and query dates in DocumentDB (as epoch timestamps). http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2014/11/19/working-with-dates-in-azure-documentdb-4/
• To get top N results, set FeedOptions.MaxItemCount and read only one page, i.e., call ExecuteNextAsync() once. See https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/microsoft.azure.documents.linq.documentqueryable.asdocumentquery.aspx for an example. We're planning to add TOP to the grammar to make this easier in the future.
• You can email me at arramac at microsoft dot com to get early access to Order By right away. This is planned for broad release shortly.

Please note that stored procedures are best used when you have a write operation(s). You'll be able to better throughput on reads when you query directly.