Querying large sets of data has some considerations and limitations. A single query has a maximum number of entities per request; it may return up to 1,000 items and its execution time cannot exceed 5 seconds on the server. If the results of a query exceeds these limits, or if a query crosses the partition boundary (a query that crosses to another partition server while searching for the values), the server will include in the response a continuation token to be used to re-query. So, continuation tokens are used as bookmarks to allow queries to resume from where they left off.
By default, the client libraries handle the continuation tokens for you and keep querying the service until all the results are retrieved. But, most of the time, you don't want to retrieve all entities in your table and sometimes you need to do paging. The TableQuery
class provides an option to use segmented queries by calling the ExecuteQuerySegmented
method, which returns a partial result and lets...