CODEWITHSUNDEEP
azureazure-storageazure-table-storage
rjha94
rjha94

Reputation: 4318

is the notion of a Table required at all in Azure Table service?

I am working with azure table services. What I would like to ask is whether the Azure internals care about the notion of Table at all?

Making things fast largely depend on partition key and row key. Tables do not look like containers or Grouping of entities because there is no limit on number of tables you can create. The total storage size is tied to my storage account.

So is Table just a notion to help people transition from RDBMS land or do they serve a purpose internally? Can I do applications with a single table design without worrying about performance? After all, if table is a just a tag then I may as well include as part of partition key.

EDIT

To give an example, Table partition keys look very much like Cassandra rows and Table rows are like Cassandra columns. It is okay to treat the Storage as a big bucket of key(RowKey)-value pairs. Partition keys are sharding mechanism. Then table just comes across as a "labeling" notion.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 92

Answers (2)

Prerak K
Prerak K

Reputation: 11195

You can have all your entities in a single azure table storage and get optimum performance by thoughtfully choosing a right Partition Key and Row Key combination, but IMHO it is any time better to have related entities each in a separate table as that would be easy manageable ( from a developer perspective) . you know what part of you application is hitting which table.

You may want to view this recorded session which discusses best practices and internals. Windows Azure Storage: What’s Coming, Best Practices, and Internals

Upvotes: 2

makerofthings7
makerofthings7

Reputation: 61433

You can think the union of a Table name and a Partition Key as being a unit of performance.

Youre probably on the thought mindset that will re-invent FatEntities. developed by Lokad.

The concept of a "Table" has many restrictions and issues. For example if you have a large table with 100,000 entries in a partition, then you can't easily jump to entry 99,001 without iterating through each of the entries. Going backwards is impossible (you cant start at the last entry and go backwards)

Upvotes: 0

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