Describe Azure Table Storage Flashcards
What is Azure Table Storage?
A scalable key/value store held in the cloud.
What is a row in Azure Table Storage?
An item identified by a unique key.
What is a column in Azure Table Storage?
An item’s values.
How is data stored in Azure Table Storage?
In a table split by partitions for fast access.
What is partitioning?
A mechanism for grouping related rows, based on a partition key. Rows with the same partition key will be stored together. This helps to not only organise the data, but improve scalability and performance as well.
What are the features of a partition?
They are independent of each other
They can scale.
Any number of them can exist in a table.
A partition’s key can be included in queries to narrow down the data to be searched and improve performance by decreasing the number of reads and writes (I/O) needed to locate the data.
What is a key in Azure Table Storage comprised of?
The partition key and the row key.
What is a Point Query?
A query that identifies a single row.
What is a Range Query?
A query that fetches a contiguous block of rows in a partition.
What are the common uses of Azure Table Storage?
Storing TBs of structured data capable of serving web applications.
Storing datasets that don’t require complex joins, foreign keys or stored procedures and that can be denormalized for fast access.
Capturing event logging and performance monitoring data.
What are the advantages of Azure Table Storage?
It’s simple to scale.
A table can hold semi-structured data.
There’s no need to map and maintain complex relationships.
Row insertion is fast.
Data retrieval is fast if you specify the partition and row keys as query criteria.
What are the disadvantages of Azure Table Storage?
Consistency needs to be considered as transactional updates across multiple entries aren’t guaranteed.
There’s no referential integrity; any relationships between rows must be maintained outside of the table.
It’s difficult to sort and filter on non-key data. Queries without key data can fully scan the table
How many columns can a Azure Table Storage table hold?
252 columns, excluding the partition and row keys.
What management benefits do Azure Table Storage provide and what do they do?
It can support very large volumes of data, up to several hundred TB in size.
When you add a row to a table, Azure Table Storage automatically manages partitions and storage allocation.
It has HA guarantees in a single region with LRS and offers, at an additional cost, increased availability with GRS.
Security and role-based access control can be configured to ensure only authorised users and apps can access your data.
What management benefits do Azure Table Storage provide and what do they do?
It can support very large volumes of data, up to several hundred TB in size.
When you add a row to a table, Azure Table Storage automatically manages partitions and storage allocation.
It has HA guarantees in a single region with LRS and offers, at an additional cost, increased availability with GRS.
Security and role-based access control can be configured to ensure only authorised users and apps can access your data.
