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Anil Erduran

Anil Erduran is a principal consultant and subject matter expert for Hitachi Data Systems EMEA, based in London, UK. He is also a dual category Microsoft Most Valuable Professional in Cloud and Datacenter Management and Microsoft Azure. Anil can be found on Twitter @anil_erduran.

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• Scalability and availability for Azure Web Apps - Wed, Jun 28 2017
• Managing Azure Virtual Machine scale sets - Wed, May 31 2017
• Azure virtual machine scale sets - Mon, May 8 2017

Azure Table storage is a NoSQL datastore and has some differences compared to traditional relational database (RDB) structure. Here are some facts about table storage:

• It’s not the same concept as SQL Server tables.
• It is a NoSQL datastore for storing large amounts of structured data.
• It’s not a RDB. No joint between tables. They are standalone.
• You can create, query, and delete entities. Mandatory properties should be defined for each action.
• Tables can have metadata as well.
• It’s designed for high transactional workloads.

The most important point is that Table storage uses a key/value pair system, which differs from a traditional RDB structure and saves you from all the requirements traditional databases have. As the name implies, a key/value system uses two columns to store the data (key and value). That’s a similar concept to PowerShell Hash tables. A hash table in PowerShell is a collection of name-value pairs where you have a key (left) and value (right).

PowerShell Hash Table

Table Storage Concept ^

Let’s go back to my previous article and review the concept behind the storage account and relevant sub-components.

Azure Storage Account Structure

Once you create your storage account, you have different storage service options. A table is one of those services and you can create multiple tables under a single storage account. Tables are used to group multiple entities.

Entities are similar to rows in a typical RDB and consist of a primary key and a set of properties. Property, on the other hand, is the actual name/value pair, which is similar to columns.

As this is not a traditional RDB, tables also don’t enforce a fixed scheme. So you can have one row with 5 columns and another row with 2 columns. Or you can store different sets of properties/formats in the same column.

No fixed scheme for tables

Entity Key Properties: ^

As we said, each entity has a primary key and three default system properties:

• PartitionKey: This property should be populated by the developer for each insert, update, and delete operation. It’s actually used to organize entities in partitions to scale and load-balance tables across storage nodes. Each partition key is a unique identifier and is used to identify the partition that entities belong to. Also, each partition is served from a partition server, which means that you can separate your entities by using different PartitionKeys in multiple partitions, which are served by different servers. Or you can keep them under the same partition to query faster.

• RowKey: Unique strings are used to identify entities within the partitions. PartitionKey and RowKey are usually used together to access particular entities.

• Timestamp: This property is managed by the server itself and tracks the modified time of an entity. It cannot be updated or changed.

Getting Started: ^

First you need a “General Purpose” storage account in order to play with tables.

Creating General Purpose Storage account

It’s important to copy your Storage Access Keys as we are going to use them in our script:

Copying Access Keys

Creating your first table is a straightforward process. First you need to create a storage context for your storage account and then pass it to the New-AzureStorageTable cmdlet:

Creating a table with PowerShell

Table details

Adding entities with PowerShell ^

Current PowerShell cmdlets are limited when it comes to managing entities. But you can install Storage Client Library packages, which come with Azure SDK for .NET and then you can access .NET classes within PowerShell.

Installing NuGet packages

Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage.Table.DynamicTableEntity class is part of the Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage.Table namespace and helps you to create a PowerShell object.

You then can call the Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage.Table.TableOperation.Insert method on this object to add it to the existing table.

First we need to create a connection to our Azure Storage Account and specify table name, storage account name, and access keys.

Then we need to create a custom object with the DynamicTableEntity class.

If you check the entity variable, you will see the assigned values:

Entity object values

I specified Partition1 and Row1 for this entity as these properties are mandatory.

Now we should call the TableOperation.Insert method

This is a simple example of using .NET classes and methods to manage entities with PowerShell. You can always create a PowerShell function, which accepts parameters like partitionKey, RowKey, Key, and Value and does batch entity adding.

Or you can simply create a PowerShell script, which reads a CSV file and import all the information into the Azure Table.

Querying Table entities with PowerShell ^

In order to query existing entities from a given table, we need to use the Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage.Table.TableQuery class.

Query existing entities

You can also define additional filter options. A QueryEntity object accepts additional properties, as follows:

Filter options for entities

You can also easily play with output using a PowerShell format-table:

Format query output

This has been a quick overview of Azure Table Storage and I wanted to show you how to leverage existing .NET classes to manage tables and entities via PowerShell. In the next part, we will have a look at File storage service.

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