Skip to main content

Azure Table Performance - 1 vs 100.000 Tables under the same Storage Account

By
In our system we are using Azure Table to store a list of commands that needs to be send our clients and persisted until the client is available. Because the number of clients is high (more than 100.000), it would be very expensive to store the list of commands in other resources like Redis Cache or SQL Azure.
From the performance perspective, Azure Table are amazing, very fast even at high throughput when you store a lot of data inside them.

At the first version we done a simple mapping, where we had only one Azure Table for all our clients. For each client, we had a dedicated partition in the table. This works great because Azure Table is partitioned (scale) based on the partition.


There is only a small problem with this approach and is related to maintenance and support. If a support engineering needs to look at the commands of a specific user it will be hard for him to navigate and access the data.

The second approach is to create a different Azure Table for each client. The current documentation specify that we can have as many tables we want under a Storage Account without affecting the performance.


Before doing such a change in our system we decided to run a performance test and see if the performance is impacted in one way or another if we have on one table that is big of 100.000 tables.

We run 3 different scenarios with the same load on Azure Table:
  • One big table with all the commands inside it
  • 100.000 empty tables (one per client), were clients only checked if they have commands
  • 1000.000 tables (one per client), that had 5 commands for each client
The source of the load were on-premises machine. Don't focus on the base latency, but the different between this 3 different scenarios. When we access Azure Table from Azure environment (like Worker Roles), the latency for a read operation is under 10ms.

Results are express in milliseconds and is the average of multiple runs.



As we can see there is no impact having 100.000 tables under Azure Storage or one. Based on your needs, it might be more simple to have multiple tables, especially when you need to be able to run execute cleanup steps on large amounts on data . Accessing tables partitions and delete row by row will be expensive and time consumption. Deleting a whole Azure Table can be done with only one simple request.
We can even say, based on current results that you have better performance if you use multiple tables and not only one.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to audit an Azure Cosmos DB

By
In this post, we will talk about how we can audit an Azure Cosmos DB database. Before jumping into the problem let us define the business requirement: As an Administrator I want to be able to audit all changes that were done to specific collection inside my Azure Cosmos DB. The requirement is simple, but can be a little tricky to implement fully. First of all when you are using Azure Cosmos DB or any other storage solution there are 99% odds that you’ll have more than one system that writes data to it. This means that you have or not have control on the systems that are doing any create/update/delete operations. Solution 1: Diagnostic Logs Cosmos DB allows us activate diagnostics logs and stream the output a storage account for achieving to other systems like Event Hub or Log Analytics. This would allow us to have information related to who, when, what, response code and how the access operation to our Cosmos DB was done. Beside this there is a field that specifies what was th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Can User Technical Profile Influence AI Architecture Decisions?

By
In the last few days, I ran a small experiment on Devin/Windsurf/Cascade, BMAD, and LLM-based architecture decisions. The initial concern was simple: if an AI coding assistant knows something about the user, for example, that the user is a Java developer or a .NET developer, can this information influence the architecture and technology stack that the AI will propose? This question is important because many companies are starting to use AI tools not only for coding but also for product discovery, architecture, documentation, and technical decision-making. If the AI is influenced by the developer's personal profile, the result may not be fully neutral. It may look like a business or architecture decision, but in reality, it may be partially shaped by the context of the person using the tool. The test was done using BMAD with Devin/Windsurf/Cascade. The scenario was a unified field service operations platform. The task was to let BMAD refine the product, define the architecture and s...
Post a Comment
Read more

ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded

By
Today blog post will be started with the following error when running DB tests on the CI machine: threw exception: System.InvalidOperationException: The Entity Framework provider type 'System.Data.Entity.SqlServer.SqlProviderServices, EntityFramework.SqlServer' registered in the application config file for the ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded. Make sure that the assembly-qualified name is used and that the assembly is available to the running application. See http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=260882 for more information. at System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.DependencyResolution.ProviderServicesFactory.GetInstance(String providerTypeName, String providerInvariantName) This error happened only on the Continuous Integration machine. On the devs machines, everything has fine. The classic problem – on my machine it’s working. The CI has the following configuration: TeamCity .NET 4.51 EF 6.0.2 VS2013 It see...
8 comments
Read more