Introduction To Azure Table Storage

What is Azure Table Storage?

Azure Table storage is a very popular service used to store structured NoSQL data in the cloud, providing a Key/attribute store with a schemaless design. Table storage is very well known for its schemaless architecture design.

Another advantage of table storage is that you can store flexible datasets like user data for a web application or any other device information or any other types of metadata which your service requires.

You can store any number of entities in the table. One storage account may contain any number of tables, up to the capacity limit of the storage account.

Another advantage of Azure Table storage is that it stores a large amount of structured data. The service is a NoSQL datastore which accepts authenticated calls from inside and outside the Azure cloud.

• It helps to store TBs of structured data.
• For storing datasets that don’t require complex joins, foreign keys, or stored procedures.
• Quickly querying data using a clustered index.

You can also use Table Storage to store and query huge sets of structured, non -relational data.

Table Storage Concept Diagram

Table storage contains the following components,

• Accounts
  All access to Azure Storage is done through a storage account or you can use Azure cosmos DB Table API.
  
  
• URL format
  Azure Table Storage account use this format,
  
  http://<storage account>. table.core.windows.net/<table>

• Table
  A table is a collection of entities. The table doesn’t enforce a schema on entities.
  
  
• Entity
  An entity is a set of properties, like a database row. The size of the entity in Azure Storage can be up to 1 MB in size. Also, the size of the entity in Azure Cosmos DB can be up to 2MB in size.
  
  
• Properties
  Here property defines a name-value pair. Each entity can include up to 252 properties to store data. Also, each entity has three system properties that specify a partition key, a row key and a timestamp. Entity’s row key is its unique identifier within a partition.

In the next part we will see how to create Azure Table Storage in a storage account as well as in Azure Cosmos DB with Table API.