I understand the benefit of a partition key in azure table storage. However, given my relational database background, I am a bit confused about how to retrieve an entity from azure table storage given just the rowkey. As far as I know, this is impossible. This means that I have to store the partition key/rowkey pair somewhere to just get the entity given the rowkey. Should I just introduce a 'sharding' table with one arbitrary partition key, which allows me to look up the partition key given the rowkey?
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1 Answers
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It is possible but will result in a table scan as described in this section of MSDN.
If you don't need multiple partitions then it is absolutely fine to use a single partition (e.g. using a constant) if your data isn't going to be enormous in size and needs the scalability of multiple partitions.
Another possible approach is to use your current RowKey as PartitionKey which would give you a highly scalable solution but would result in bad performance if you need to query ranges of rows.
The linked MSDN page talks about the pros and cons of both so I think with your knowledge about your specific problem domain you should be able to find a balanced solution.
