Azure Tables or SQL Azure?

Question

I am at the planning stage of a web application that will be hosted in Azure with ASP.NET for the web site and Silverlight within the site for a rich user experience. Should I u

Answer 1

Despite similar names SQL Azure Tables and Table Storage have very little in common.

Here are a two links that might help you:

• Table Storage, a 100x cost factor
• Fat Entities on Table Storage

Basically, the first question should wonder about is Does my app really need to scale? If not, then go for SQL Azure.

Answer 2

For your question, I want to talk about how to decide with logic choose SQL Table and which need to use Azure Table.

As we know SQL Table is a relational database engine. but if you have a big data in one table the SQL Table is not applicable, because SQL query get big data is slow.

At this time you can choose Azure Table, the Azure Table query is so fast then SQL Table for big data, for example, in our website, someone subscribed many articles, we make the article as feed to user, every user have a copy of article title and description, so in the article table there are lots of data, if we use SQL Table, each query execution maybe take more than 30 seconds. But in Azure Table get users article feed by PartitionKey and RowKey is so fast.

From this example you may know how to choose between in SQL Table and Azure Table.

Answer 3

I think that you have first to define what your application usage funnels are. Will your data model be subjected to frequent changes or it is a stable one? You have to be able to perform ultra fast inserts and reads are not so complicated? Do you need advance google like search? Storing BLOBS?

Those are the questions (and not only) that you have to ask and answer yourself in order to decide if you are more likely going to use NoSql or SQL approach in storing your data.

Please consider that both approaches can easily coexist and can be extended with BLOB storage as well.

Answer 4

I suggest looking at Azure Cache in combination with Azure Table. Table alone has 200-300ms latencies, with occasional spikes higher, which can significantly slow down response times / UI interactivity. Cache + Table seems to be a winning combination, for me.

Answer 5

I wonder whether we are going to end up with some "vendor independent" cloud api libraries in due course?

Answer 6

Both Azure Tables and SQL Azure are two different beasts.Both are meant for different scenarios, one con to azure table is that you cannot move from azure to any other platform, unless you write providers in your code that can handle such shifts.