SQL Azure Vs Azure Table Storage – Cheat Sheet
Every since I started working on Azure most of the people I worked with or I had delivered a session to, often asks me about the question that whether they should use Azure Table Storage or SQL Azure. My standard reply to that question is “It Depends”. It depends on multiple factors so you need to understand the basic difference between the two to make a decision.
Before moving ahead, if you don’t know the difference between SQL and NO-SQL, I will suggest to read about it and come back to this post so that you will be able to understand it better. I will also suggest to go through the official documentation of the both before making any architectural decision but here is the cheat sheet that I have prepared to quickly go through for the difference between the two.
Developers mostly handles the relationship in code itself but it’s changing with the introduction of No-SQL . Azure SQL provides higher data integrity but is limited in storage capability and scalability whereas Table Storage is dead cheap and offers simple no sql storage capacity. So this article doesn’t give you the detail analysis of either of service and we didn’t explained the differences either but we shared the cheatsheet to make your life easier.
Summary
If size is the issue, that would be the first flag that you might want to consider Azure Tables. As long as the support Tables has for transactions and queries meets your needs. Further if you need sophisticated transactions, or a complex authorization model might require the services of SQL Azure