Entity Group Transactions

In the previous chapter, we worked with the Entity Group Transactions (EGTs), which are the only built-in mechanisms for performing batch transaction across multiple entities in a table; thus providing the so-called atomic operations. EGTs only work on entities of the same partition (sharing same partition key), so atomic transactional behavior on entities requires that many entities have the same partition key.

An EGT can operate on a maximum of 100 entities. For improved performance, it is better to batch a single operation per entity in order to avoid any delays.

EGTs are seriously considered when selecting the table's partition key, since they introduce a trade-off that must be studied carefully when designing your tables. Having huge partitions increases the benefits from EGTs performing atomic transactions, thus increasing consistency, but this might limit the scalability of your table since automatic load balancing cannot be done on single partitions.