Azure Tables or SQL Azure?

Question

I am at the planning stage of a web application that will be hosted in Azure with ASP.NET for the web site and Silverlight within the site for a rich user experience. Should I use Azure Tables or SQL Azure for storing my application data?

Answer 1

Azure Table Storage appears to be less expensive than SQL Azure. It is also more highly scalable than SQL Azure.

SQL Azure is easier to work with if you've been doing a lot of relational database work. If you were porting an application that was already using a SQL database, then moving it to SQL Azure would be the obvious choice, but that's the only situation where I would recommend it.

The main limitation on Azure Tables is the lack of secondary indexes. This was announced at PDC '09 and is currently listed as coming soon, but there hasn't been any time-frame announcement. (See http://windowsazure.uservoice.com/forums/34192-windows-azure-feature-voting/suggestions/396314-support-secondary-indexes?ref=title)

I've seen the proposed use of a hybrid system where you use table and blob storage for the bulk of your data, but use SQL Azure for indexes, searching and filtering. However, I haven't had a chance to try that solution yet myself.

Once the secondary indexes are added to table storage, it will essentially be a cloud based NoSQL system and will be much more useful than it is now.

Answer 2

Despite similar names SQL Azure Tables and Table Storage have very little in common.

Here are a two links that might help you:

• Table Storage, a 100x cost factor
• Fat Entities on Table Storage

Basically, the first question should wonder about is Does my app really need to scale? If not, then go for SQL Azure.