allowing for load balancing across storage nodes. All entities with the same PartitionKey are stored on the same storage node. The RowKey is used to provide uniqueness within a given partition. To get the best performance, you should give a lot of thought to the PrimaryKey and RowKey and how you need to retrieve the data. You don’t want all of your data to be in the same partition; nor do you want each entity to be in its own partition. The Azure Table service provides scalability targets for both storage account and partitions. The Timestamp property is maintained by Azure, and it represents the date and time the entity was last modified. Azure Table service uses this to support optimistic concurrency with Etags. In addition to the system properties, each entity has a collection of key/value pairs called properties. There is no schema, so the key/value pairs of each entity can contain values of different properties. For example, you could be doing logging, and one entity could contain a payload of {customer id, customer name, request date/time, request} and the next could have {customer id, order id, item count, date-time order filled}. You can store up to 252 key/value pairs in each table entity. 207 of 540
C H A P T E R 4 | Azure Storage