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What is the Table Service

The Azure Table storage service stores large amounts of structured data. The service is a NoSQL datastore which accepts authenticated calls from inside and outside the Azure cloud. Azure tables are ideal for storing structured, non-relational data. Common uses of the Table service include:

  • Storing TBs of structured data capable of serving web scale applications
  • Storing datasets that don't require complex joins, foreign keys, or stored procedures and can be denormalized for fast access
  • Quickly querying data using a clustered index
  • Accessing data using the OData protocol and LINQ queries with WCF Data Service .NET Libraries

You can use the Table service to store and query huge sets of structured, non-relational data, and your tables will scale as demand increases.

Table Service Concepts

The Table service contains the following components:

Table1

  • URL format: Code addresses tables in an account using this address format:
    http://<storage account>.table.core.windows.net/<table>

    You can address Azure tables directly using this address with the OData protocol. For more information, see OData.org

  • Storage Account: All access to Azure Storage is done through a storage account. See Azure Storage Scalability and Performance Targets for details about storage account capacity.

  • Table: A table is a collection of entities. Tables don't enforce a schema on entities, which means a single table can contain entities that have different sets of properties. The number of tables that a storage account can contain is limited only by the storage account capacity limit.

  • Entity: An entity is a set of properties, similar to a database row. An entity can be up to 1MB in size.

  • Properties: A property is a name-value pair. Each entity can include up to 252 properties to store data. Each entity also has 3 system properties that specify a partition key, a row key, and a timestamp. Entities with the same partition key can be queried more quickly, and inserted/updated in atomic operations. An entity's row key is its unique identifier within a partition.

For details about naming tables and properties, see Understanding the Table Service Data Model.