Late Tuesday night, Weather Now finished importing and indexing 15,430,045 places from around the world, ending with Mutirikwi Dam, Masvingo, Zimbabwe at 9:29 pm CST. (I need to re-import about 11,000 records for places that don't belong to any particular country, but that's low-priority.)
When I first built the Weather Now Gazetteer in July 2002, I only imported populated places, because database space was a lot more expensive then. So from 2002 until the v5 upgrade launched 3 years ago, the Gazetteer had about 7.5 million records and lived in a relational SQL database that migrated to the Cloud in 2013.
This time, I imported every scrap of geographic data I could find in the US, which added 8 million more. And starting later this year, I'll automate updates, particularly from sources that change frequently like the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the Federal Aviation Administration. I may import other databases later on, but for now, I think we're good.
Pricing for Cosmos DB works differently than it used to for SQL Server. Weather Now v4 (2013-2022) used an Azure SQL DB size that cost $10 per month. That gave me up to 10 GB of relational storage for everything, which is why all the weather data moved to really inexpensive flat storage (Azure Tables) that cost about 4.5c per GB per month. When Weather Now lived on-premises through 2013, the Gazetteer and weather data took up about 50 GB (25 GB for the Gazetteer and 25 GB for the first 11 years of weather data), but it cost nothing except electricity—$100 a month of electricity, in fact.
With Cosmos DB, I pay for database transactions, called Request Units, plus a small fee of 25c per GB per month for storage. It gets a little complicated, but basically, the biggest expense for the database is the import, which cost about $75. Going forward, the biggest database expense will be the search service, which costs $2.42 per day. Storing 20 years of weather data costs $1.65 per day. Of course, the application service hosting Weather Now runs $3.60 a day, so it does all add up.
Because the daily cost summary takes a full UTC day to update, I don't have the new run rate for the application yet. When that comes out tonight, I may have to look into ways to defray the cost of the app, whether by voluntary donations or *gulp* advertising.
Incidentally, The Daily Parker costs $4.87 per day ($3.60 for the app service, 79c for storage, and 48c for the database. Now that Weather Now is pretty much where I want it, my next project will be to write a new blog engine and port this app to something that will cost about half that. So be on the lookout for a tip jar on this app as well.