Slow Query performance on Azure Tables when using Partition Key and ranged RowKeys

Question

I'm very new to Azure Tables, and i'm running into some performance problems. I have a query, that fetches thousands of rows using a partition key and a ranged rowkey.

PartitionKey = "Example123" and RowKey >= DateTime.Now.Ticks and RowKey < DateTime.Now.AddHours(1).Ticks.
The rowkey is a guid prefixed with a datetime.Ticks string.

This query takes 2-3 seconds to return 8000 entries. Is this reasonable?

Example entry:

A: "C6-85-08-07-06-98",
B: "C6-85-08-07-06-i1",
C: 123,
At: "2013-12-03T19:16:26.0799718Z",
PartitionKey: "example1",
RowKey: "635216949860799718_ca86be88-0995-4da8-90d6-351c615ec9ab",
Timestamp: "2013-12-03T19:16:36.5872058+00:00",
ETag: "W/"datetime'2013-12-03T19%3A16%3A36.5872058Z'""

Example Code
This is the code i'm using (SDK 2.1):

TableQuery<RawDataEntity> rangeQuery = new TableQuery<RawDataEntity>().Where(
            TableQuery.CombineFilters(
                TableQuery.GenerateFilterCondition("PartitionKey", QueryComparisons.Equal, _partitionKey),
                TableOperators.And,
                IsWithin(from, to)
                ));

         // returns after ~3000 ms
         var result = _table.ExecuteQuery(rangeQuery).ToList();




// Helper method
public static string IsWithin(DateTime from, DateTime to)
    {
        return TableQuery.CombineFilters(
                TableQuery.GenerateFilterCondition("RowKey", QueryComparisons.GreaterThanOrEqual, from.Ticks.ToString()),
                TableOperators.And,
                TableQuery.GenerateFilterCondition("RowKey", QueryComparisons.LessThan, to.Ticks.ToString())

                );
    }

If there is nothing wrong with my query - what other ways are there to query a large table(easily over 10k rows) and return 10 000+ rows of data?

Alexandre Brisebois Alexandre Brisebois · Accepted Answer · 2013-12-03T23:44:08

Considering how the API works, 3 seconds is pretty fast. If you look at how the data is returned by the API using a tool like Fiddler, you will probably notice that your data is fetched over a few requests. The API uses paging to return your data.

I would recommend if possible that you query for subsets of your data using multiple parallel queries.

Slow Query performance on Azure Tables when using Partition Key and ranged RowKeys

2 Answers