Azure Table Storage
Did you know Azure provides data storage in a NoSQL engine? In addition to SQL Azure, Microsoft also supports BLOB storage for large objects and Table Storage for objects under 1Mb. Table Storage is an alternative for data that may be structured, but does not require relationships with other data.
According to Microsoft common uses may be:
- Storing TBs of structured data capable of serving web scale applications
- Storing datasets that don’t require complex joins, foreign keys, or stored procedures and can be de-normalized for fast access
- Quickly querying data using a clustered index
- Accessing data using the OData protocol and LINQ queries with WCF Data Service .NET Libraries
I find Azure table storage to be an interesting alternative because it lives in the Cloud. It provides failover and web scale performance at a currently competitive price. Like anything with Microsoft, the future price is difficult to predict.
The data may be sharded, allowing it to be hosted across multiple servers. Sharding is a technique that can increase performance for large volumes of data; it is not required and slows down performance on smaller sets of data.
Since Azure table storage is in the cloud and is easy to program it makes it an candidate you should consider for a data storage platform. It works with applications hosted locally or inside Azure itself. What you cannot do is store Azure Table Storage Services on your own hardware. Be sure to include the cost of data access fees when you are estimating your cost for using Azure storage of any kind.
You can find some basic examples for configuring and using Table Storage at www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/how-to-guides/table-services/.
Have you used Table Storage? How do you think it compares to other NoSQL options available today? Share your thoughts below, or drop me an email at btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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