Database Reference
In-Depth Information
• A queue storage to store messages
A BLOB is a group of containers, which is just unstructured data, such as a video or audio
file stored as binary storage in a data store.
Table storage is a No-SQL solution instead of the relational SQL database. It can store
data across multiple machines. Each table can contain partitions across multiple machines.
These tables have entities with partition and row keys to access the entity. Access to the
table data uses a key-value pair to access the data store. These tables do not enforce a
SQL table schema that a SQL server would do for storage. Since there is very little en-
forcement to create a table, the objects are loosely coupled to the access, as there are just
key-value pair references. This helps in access speed as management of the data is minim-
al, and requires less storage as various SQL schema pieces for table management are not
used. Thus, it can take less storage, resulting in less cost for the data. For table storage,
there is a partition key, row key, and a timestamp:
•
Partition key
: This is a unique key associated with a partition as a collection of
all associated rows. This is defined to specify which partition to access. An ex-
ample is the name of the table.
•
Row key
: This is a unique key to identify the row in the partition, and is usually a
unique ID.
•
Timestamp
: This is the time at which the row was updated, and is updated by
Azure.
Queue storage is very similar to storing messages in MSMQ, except that the management
tools are in Azure Cloud. NSB uses Azure queues in a manner similar to MSMQ and SQL
Queues. However, Azure queues do not use DTC. There is a lot of support from NSer-
viceBus for both Azure queues and Azure service bus queues.
Just as many of the Azure Cloud items can be managed through the Azure SDK and Visu-
al Studio, storage queues can also be managed through the Visual Studio 2012 Server Ex-
plorer.
