CODEWITHSUNDEEP
azureazure-storageazure-table-storage
Thomas Jespersen
Thomas Jespersen

Reputation: 11803

Is the Azure Table storage 2nd generation always better than 1st generation?

Microsoft changed the architecture of the Azure Storage to use eg. SSD's for journaling and 10 Gbps network (instead of standard Harddrives and 1G ps network). Se http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2012/11/02/windows-azure-s-flat-network-storage-and-2012-scalability-targets.aspx

Here you can read that the storage is designed for "Up to 20,000 entities/messages/blobs per second".

My concern is that 20.000 entities (or rows in Table Storage) is actually not a lot.

We have a rather small solution with a table with 1.000.000.000 rows. With only 20.000 entities pr. second it will take more than half a day to read all rows.

I realy hope that the 20.000 entities actually means that you can do up to 20.000 requests pr. second.

I'm pretty sure the 1st generation allowed up to 5.000 requests pr. second.

So my question is. Are there any scenarios where the 1st generation Azure storage is actually more scalable than the second generation?

Any there any other reason we should not upgrade (move our data to a new storage)? Eg. we tried to get ~100 rows pr. partition, because that was what gave us the best performance characteristic. Are there different characteristic for the 2nd generation? Or has there been any changes that might introduce bugs if we change?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 650

Answers (1)

astaykov
astaykov

Reputation: 30903

You have to read more carefully. The exact quote from the mentioned post is:

Transactions – Up to 20,000 entities/messages/blobs per second

Which is 20k transactions per second. Which is you correctly do hope for. I surely do not expect to have 20k 1M files uploaded to the blob storage. But I do expect to be able to execute 20k REST Calls.

As for tables and table entities, you could combine them in batches. Given the volume you have I expect that you already are using batches. There single Entity Group Transaction is counted as a single transaction, but may contain more than one entity. Now, rather then assessing whether it is low or high figure, you really need a good setup and bandwidth to utilize these 20k transactions per second.

Also, the first generation scalability target was around that 5k requests/sec you mention. I don't see a configuration/scenario where Gen 1 would be more scalable than Gen 2 storage.

Are there different characteristic for the 2nd generation?

The differences are outlined in that blog post you refer.

As for your last concern:

Or has there been any changes that might introduce bugs if we change?

Be sure there are not such changes. Azure Storage service behavior is defined in the REST API Reference. The API is not any different based on Storage service Generation. It is versioned based on features.

Upvotes: 1

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