Accessing Table Storage

For security purposes, each request to Table Storage must be authenticated using the 256-bit shared keys created when we added the storage service. Table Storage can be directly accessed via REST, or queried using a subset of LINQ. The REST interface allows languages such as Java, PHP, and Ruby to consume Table Storage, while client libraries for ADO.NET Data Services are limited to the .NET languages.

Each request made via the REST API has a different set of required headers, and the body of each request is Atom format. Queries made via the REST API will return either 1,000 records, or run for 5 seconds (a total of 30 seconds from scheduling/processing to completion). If a query crosses these boundaries, a continuation token will be returned, which can be used in a subsequent request. Responses from the REST API are in AtomPubformat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(standard)). The ADO.NET Data Services client libraries do not have query boundaries.

An important...