The Windows Azure Table Service is the Windows Azure Storage Service feature that provides cost-effective scalable storage of entities. In this chapter, we focus on the Table service. In related chapters, we look at the other storage services: the Blob service and the Queue service.
During the last three decades, relational databases have become the dominant data system. Relational databases are transaction-oriented and implement ACID semantics in which database transactions are atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable. These are important considerations for a data system where data fidelity is absolute, such as those used in a financial system. However, large-scale data systems implementing ACID semantics are extremely expensive.
In the last decade, there has been a growing interest in creating cost-effective, large-scale data systems. This interest is driven primarily by the data mining needs of social websites that generate enormous amounts of click-stream data. Much of this...