Azure Details and Limitations - Blobs, Tables, and Queues
The Dallas Azure User Group will be meeting tomorrow at the Microsoft offices in Irving for our second meeting. I'm teamed up with Mike Holdorf and Rob Vettor to discuss Azure storage, namely Blobs, Tables, and Queues. The listing below is the document that I put together to hand out at the meeting with the "Details and Limitations". This should help us in our application designs as we move some of our systems to the cloud. These details are from the current SDK help file.
Windows Azure Details and Limitations
Blobs, Tables, and Queues
( From the Windows Azure SDK Help File )
Blobs
- Block Id - 64 Bytes Per Block
- PutBlob - 64 MB Total
- Blob MetaData - 8 KB Per Blob
- PutBlock / PutBlockList - 50 GB Each
- Blocks - 4 MB Each
Container Name:
- Valid DNS Name
- All Lowercase
- 3 to 63 Characters
- Starts With Letter or Number
- Letters, Numbers, and Dash (-)
- Every Dash (-) Must Be Immediately Preceded and Followed by a Letter or Number
Blob Name:
- 1,024 Characters Max
- Any combination of characters, but reserved URL characters must be properly escaped
- Specify a delimiter within a blob name to create a virtual hierarchy though blob storage is flat and not a hierarchical
Tables
Table Name:
- Only Alphanumeric Characters
- Case-Insensitive
- 3 to 63 Characters
- May Not Begin With a Numeric Character
- Up to 255 Entity Properties (including PartitionKey, RowKey, and Timestamp)
- 1 MB Max for Combined Size of All Data in an Entity's Properties
Property Name:
- Case-Sensitive
- 255 Characters Max
- Only Alphanumeric Characters
- Must Begin With a Letter
Queues
- Messages - 8 KB Max
- Messages pushed to end of queue and popped from front of queue (FIFO)
- Unlimited number of messages
Queue Name:
- Valid DNS name
- All Lowercase
- 3 to 63 Characters
- Start With a Letter or Number
- Letters, Numbers, and Dash (-)
- First and Last Letters Must be Alphanumeric
- Dash (-) character may not be the first or last letter