Find a Blob in Azure Container

Question

I have thousands & thousands of Blobs in a container, something like

A/Temp/A001-1.log
A/Temp/A001-2.log
A/Temp/A001-3.log
B/Tmp/B001-1.log
B/Tmp/B001-2.log
B/Tmp/B002-1.log

Now my problem is that I want to find Blob having A001 in its name. I understand that ListBlobsWithPrefix looks for Blob starting with some text which is not the case for me. ListBlobs would bring all the blobs to my code and then I would have to search for the one. Is there any way where I can just get the blobs I am looking for.

David Makogon David Makogon · Accepted Answer · 2013-07-14T01:00:13

There's really no easy way to search a container for a specific blob (or set of blobs with a name pattern) aside from brute-force. And name prefixes, as you've guessed, won't help you either in this case.

What I typically advise folks to do is keep their searchable metadata somewhere else (maybe SQL DB, maybe MongoDB, doesn't really matter as long as it provides the search capability they need), with that data store containing a reference link to the exact blob. The blob name itself can also be stored in the metadata as one of the searchable properties.

Also: Once you get into the "thousands & thousands of blobs in a container," you'll find that pulling the blob names is going to take a while (which, again, I think you're seeing). Containers can certainly hold as many blobs as you want, but in that case, you really want to be accessing them directly, based on some other metadata, and not enumerating through the name list.

Find a Blob in Azure Container

3 Answers