What is Azure Table Storage???

While designing a NoSql database, I will remember following points.

1. Cost
2. Scalability
3. Speed
4. Nature of my application
5. Latency

Azure Table storage is a very popular service used to store structured NoSQL data in the cloud, providing a Key/value store with a schema less design.

Table storage is very well known for its schemaless architecture design. It is known as PoorMan’s SQL(cheapest DocumentDb database).

Primary Key and RowKey(PK/RK) Anytime you know both the partition key and the row key, the data access is very fast. The primary key in Azure Table Storage is made up of two columns: PartitionKey and RowKey.

There are some things to consider while choosing ATS(Azure Table Storage) as your datastore.

ATS has a primary index only on partition key and row key, hence you would have to select your PK and RK carefully. If you have more than these two fields for querying ATS isn’t really suited. ATS is fast but Microsoft doesn’t provide any latency number.

Then what about Global replication??

ATS is part of the Storageaccount, you could have a read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) model with an optional read-only region. But the consistency between the two is eventual and not clearly defined.

Real time Example???

Table Storage is also designed to be able to store huge volumes of data. So another use case it’s great for is for storing logs and diagnostic information. In fact, a several Azure services (like Azure Functions for example) use Table Storage as the backing store for their own logs.

Ok then, what are the ATS advantages??

1. Low cost
2. ATS is highly scalable
3. Accessing data from Table storage is very fast as it does not involve joins to retrieve data.
4. Another advantage of Azure Table storage is that it stores a large amount of structured data.
5. For storing datasets that don’t require complex joins, foreign keys, or stored procedures.

Interview Questions on Azure Table storage

1. What are the benefits of table storage?
2. Difference between sql database table and Azure storage table?
3. Explain Azure table storage data model?
4. why to partition Azure table?
5. What is Azure table primary key?
6. Guidelines on how to choose partition key and row key?
7. Explain how partition key is linked to scalability?
8. How do partitions work in storage services like blobs and queues?
9. What are entity group transactions?