Windows Azure persistent storage tip

Question

Ive just activated my Azure account, created ny first Asp Mvc 3.0 project (just the template) and deployed it :). Wonderfull

However im about to create a small app (just to get to learn Azure) and have hit a minor issue. Heres what i want to do: Create an mvc app which displays my music library and allow for searching, sorting, add new albums, etc. Theres proberbly about 3000 albums.

What kind of storage should i use and does anyone know of a good tutorial example about how to dó this in c# with mvc?

Please note i dó not want to use SQL Azure, that would be to easy. I need to dig in and learn blob/table/? Types.

I just need a Sound recomendation on which storage type i should start studying, and more importantly where i should study it :).

Answer 1

Azure Storage Tables are different from SQL in which they are managed by the Azure and not by a DBMS. The have a Key field through which you can find data within the table, and you can use LINQ to access it. That said, there should be performance considerations when choosing where each data would go. SQL Azure should provide better relational access, so if you are going to have a high number of tables and expect a lot of joins operations, I'd go with it. But, if you are using a simple structured data that you need to maintain in your application, you can choose tables.

Of course, since storage is 10x cheaper than SQL Azure, you will always want to design applications that make good use of storage, but remember to check for any performance issues you might have.

Answer 2

The Windows Azure Platform Training Kit has a few labs, under Exploring Windows Azure Storage. That should give you a good start understanding the table and entity approach. Pay specific attention to partition and row keys. Storage is optimized to be colocated around partition key, and indexed within a partition via row key. You'll need to carefully plan your row key for searching. If you need to search on multiple properties within a table, you'll need to consider either additional tables (each containing a row key that you'd search), or maybe a NoSQL database like MongoDB (or a relational database like SQL Azure, but you said you want to avoid that approach).

Also, take a look at this blog post by David Pallman - he has a complete set of code snippets for every single type of storage operation. This could save you many hours of time as you try to figure out all the ways to interact with Table Storage.

Then, look at this MSDN post that talks about storage transactions, which will be relevant when you move beyond simple examples and shift focus into production code.