Using continuation tokens and server-side paging

The Windows 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 in the table. However, entities with different values of PartitionKey may be managed by different partition servers. 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 satisfying 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 (a possibly null) x-ms-continuation-NextRowKey into the response if there are additional results. These headers comprise the continuation...