The Azure Table service uses partition servers to manage the entities stored in a table. One partition server manages all the entities with the same PartitionKey value in the table. However, different partition servers might manage entities with different values of PartitionKey. This distribution of entities among partition servers is, in general, transparent to clients of the Table service. This partitioning scheme is central to the scalability of the Table service.

When processing a query, the Table service submits the query to the first partition server (ordered by PartitionKey) that manages entities that satisfy any filter on PartitionKey. It then returns the first page of up to 1,000 entities retrieved by the partition server. The Table service inserts two headers, x-ms-continuation-NextPartitionKey and x-ms-continuation-NextRowKey(possibly null), into the response if there are additional results. These headers comprise the continuation...