As companies continue to move to the cloud we are constantly finding new and better way to meeting requirements and deliver rock solid solutions. Over the last year there is one area where my team has found some great capabilities that I believe are currently under utilized by SharePoint and Office 365 developers, and that is Azure Table Storage. For those that are not familiar with it, Azure Table storage is a service within the Azure Storage group that stores structured NoSQL data. It is incredibly fast, inexpensive, and NoSQL gives you the capability to store content with flexible datasets. We have started to rely on this for both internal products as well as client consulting engagements. Thanks to the technical leadership and innovation from Jake Dan Attis we have started to find a number of creative uses for the service, some of those solutions I’ll be blogging about over the next few months.
In the meantime, here is a good primer for Azure Storage:
Along with some great links for working with Azure Table Storage:
- Get started with Azure Table storage using .NET: Great overview of Azure Table Storage as well as a run through on how to interact with it in .NET
- Table Service Concepts: Technical breakdown of the service
- Storage Services REST API: API for the overarching Storage Services including authentication
- Table Service REST API: API for table services and interacting with tables and entities
- Using Azure PowerShell with Azure Storage: PowerShell reference for interacting with Azure Storage
- Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer: An essential client tool for interacting with your storage accounts and objects. Using this you can browse, create objects, or query entities