Microsoft Azure Storage services provides features of storing NoSQL data in the Table Storage. The Azure Table Storage stores schema-less data using Key/Value pairs. Since the data store is schema-less, we can use Table Storage to store the data for those applications that are designed and targeted to flexible data capture. Although the data is stored as schema-less, it is easy to query the data using simple querying mechanism.
You can consider using Table storage where you need not to use complex joins, stored procedures for any data operations.
You can consider using Table storage where you need not to use complex joins, stored procedures for any data operations.
Table Storage and Creating Resource Group and Storage Account
Following are some of the features of Azure Table Storage
- Table is a collection of entities. These entities does not enforce any schema. This provides a flexibility to store data for different set of properties for entities.
- Entity is a set of properties. Conceptually we can map an entity with a table row on relational database. The max size of entity in Table is 1 MB.
- Property is a name/value pair. We can have max 252 user defined properties in entity and along with these there are 3 system properties present in entity. These properties are RowKey, PartitionKey and Timestamp.
- PartitionKey, this is the key based on which the data in the Table Storage is stored in logical partition. This provides query optimization while retrieving data from table storage.
- RowKey, is the unique identification of the entity in the table storage.
To use Azure Storage, we need a Microsoft Azure Subscription. Please visit this link to create a free subscription. Make sure that you read all features and limits of using Azure Free Subscription. Once you have a subscription, login to the portal and you can start using its features.
