Transactions and Continuation tokens in Windows Azure Storage Tables

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How many transactions are fired for retrieving 1200 entities in Azure Storage Tables, keeping continuation Tokens in mind.

I have read that " Windows Azure Tables returns up to a maximum of 1000 entities in a single request and returns a continuation token when more results(remaining 200 entities) are available." See at (http://blog.smarx.com/posts/windows-azure-tables-expect-continuation-tokens-seriously).

Because Azure charges on the basis of the no. of transactions we perform over the cloud; I just want to know: How many transactions will be executed for a single request that returns say 1200 entities(rows) with a continuation token after 1000th entity(row) result?

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azuretransactionstokenazure-table-storagecontinuation
Not that this answers your question, but... at a cost of a penny per 100,000 transactions, I suspect the cost of transactions will be dwarfed by the cost of compute + storage, such that transaction cost probably won't factor much (if at all) into your monthly budgeting. – David Makogon
Thnks David for the reply. I have read lot of articles of yours. Well, I am actully dealing with 1000K+ entities(about 2Lakhs to 20 Lakhs) which are updating at every 30sec. When this comes into picture, i do need to look the no. of transactions too. And the Continuation token aspect of the Azure Storage tables also... – Sunil Padhi

1 Answers

3
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How many transactions will be executed for a single request that returns say 1200 entities(rows) with a continuation token after 1000th entity(row) result?

It actually depends. As the documentation states that Windows Azure Table returns up to a maximum of 1000 entities in a single request. What that means is that in your case, the minimum number of transactions would be 2 however the maximum number of transactions could be 1200. It all depends on how your data is partitioned and the load on your storage account. The more partitions you have, chances are that you'll receive lesser data per request thus more transaction. Again request execution time (server side) would also need be taken into consideration because if the execution takes more than the allocated time, the service will return the partial data.

Based on the documentation here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/dd179421.aspx, you can expect a continuation token if one or more conditions are true:

  1. If the number of entities to be returned exceeds 1000.
  2. If the server timeout interval is exceeded.
  3. If the query crosses the partition boundary.