Azure Table Storage

Introduction

Azure Table storage is a NoSQL (structured/semi-structured) datastore service in the cloud
A schemaless, key-value (key-attribute) store (entity store)
Wide column store
Key-value data storage system (table has rows that are composed of key-value pairs)
Azure table storage can store petabytes of data, scallable and is inexpensive
Access: table storage can be accessed using followings:
- REST
- OData protocols
- Storage Explorer tool
Naming rules: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/storageservices/Understanding-the-Table-Service-Data-Model#table-names

Ideal for storing and querying structured, non-relational data
Storing datasets that don’t require complex joins, foreign keys, or stored procedures
Storing datasets that can be denormalized for fast access
Quickly querying data using a clustered index
Lower cost than RDBMS

Storage account:
- parent namespace for tables
- can create any number of tables within a given storage account, as long as each table is uniquely named
Table: collections of entities
Entity:
- an entity is a set of properties, similar to a database row
- has a primary key and a set of properties
Property:
- a property is a name-value pair
- each entity can include up to 252 properties to store data
- each entity also has three system properties (partition key, row key and timestamp)

Azure table storage components relationship diagram

Table (in table storage) is neither a traditional table, nor a SQL table, rather a schema-less collection of entities
The table doesn’t enforce a schema on entities
A single table can contain entities that have different sets of properties

Tables (in table storage) don’t have the notion of followings:
- columns
- constraints
- 1:1 or 1:* relationships (and any of their variations)
SQL tables have schemas, while tables (in table storage) are schemaless

Azure table storage - create table