Azure Storage Limitations - Blobs, Tables, and Queues

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