Azure and SQL Storage Tables

Question

I'm just starting to learn Azure, and I don’t see too many scenarios where you would like to put something in an Azure storage table, not SQL. Perhaps I'm used to working in environments where I need related data?

When is it better to put something in an Azure storage table rather than a table in an Azure SQL database?

Answer 1

SQL Azure works great when you want to work with structured data using relationships, indexes, constraints, etc.

The Azure storage table works great when you need to work with centralized structured data without connections and usually with large volumes.

Price: SQL Azure: $ 25.98 / mo for 5 GB

Storage table: $ 21.88 / m for 175 GB (without transactions or bandwidth) Therefore, when you store large amounts of data, the storage table is much cheaper ... think about registering, for example.

Centralization: Windows Azure is a distributed environment for servers, so if you save something on one machine, others do not know about it, so the storage table is a good solution for centralized logs, processing sessions, settings or something else (remember that there is latency even in one data center)

Speed: If you designed it correctly, in many cases the storage table should be faster than sql azure, but it probably depends on the use cases, and I really haven't tested it.

Answer 2

As I add the last post to this post, I wanted to mention one thing that did not seem to be covered. Azure SQL has data limits (I guessed soon). 5 GB for Web Edition and 150 GB for Business Edition. For some solutions, this is quite adequate. But for others, this may not be the case, and I personally came across this.

The Azure Drive’s upper limit is much higher. I believe its 100 TB.

Also, although NoSQL is not relational in nature, it is not necessarily bad. We often think that we need a relationship, when in fact, if we think about our problems differently, we cannot do this. You can enforce relationships within the code itself, which I suspect most developers do a lot more than they really think.

Answer 3

This article should help resolve some doubts about the differences.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ff796231.aspx

Answer 4

I would always use azure tables as a MUCH cheaper solution if:

• I am selecting tables ONLY using PK (selection by properties is slow due to all deserialization)
• I can live with a limited set of Linq ( Query Operators (Table Support)
• I do not need to join tables and perform complex queries on the server
• I need a horizontal breakdown of the "fragments" of my data (Sql Azure Federations - a step in this direction according to the tables with PartionKey from day 0

Answer 5

You should read the benefits of "NoSQL" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoSQL

No relational databases, no schema, big data, scale, to name a few!