Introduction

The Microsoft Azure Table Service is the Storage service feature that provides cost-effective scalable storage of entities.

During the last 3 decades, relational databases have become the dominant data storage systems. Relational databases are transaction oriented and implement ACID semantics in which database transactions are atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable. These are important considerations for a data system where data fidelity is of absolute importance, such as those used in a financial system. However, large-scale data systems that implement ACID semantics are extremely expensive, as they require huge infrastructures behind them.

In the last decade, there has been a growing interest in creating cost-effective, large-scale data systems. This interest is driven primarily by those in need of data collection, such as the data-mining needs of social websites that generate enormous amounts of click-stream data or scientific datasets. Much of this data is read only, so...