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Windows Azure Details and Limitations

Gaurav Mantri

Sep 2, 2009

Category: Azure Storage

Containers/Blobs

  • Block Id – 64 Bytes Per Block
  • PutBlob – 64 MB Total
  • Blob MetaData – 8 KB Per Blob
  • Container MetaData – 8 KB Per Container
  • PutBlock / PutBlockList 50 GB Each
  • If you use Blocks then upto 4 MB of Each Block

Container Name

  • Valid DNS Name
  • All Lowercase
  • 3 to 63 Characters
  • Starts With Letter or Number
  • Letters, Numbers, and Dash (-)
  • Every Dash (-) Must Be Immediately Preceded and Followed by a Letter or Number

Blob Name

  • 1,024 Characters Max
  • Any combination of characters, but reserved URL characters must be properly escaped
  • Specify a delimiter within a blob name to create a virtual hierarchy though blob storage is flat and not a hierarchical

Tables

Table Name

  • Only Alphanumeric Characters
  • Case-Insensitive
  • 3 to 63 Characters
  • May Not Begin With a Numeric Character
  • Up to 255 Entity Properties (including PartitionKey, RowKey, and Timestamp)
  • 1 MB Max for Combined Size of All Data in an Entity’s Properties

Property Name

  • Case-Sensitive
  • 255 Characters Max
  • Only Alphanumeric Characters and ‘_’
  • Can’t begin With a Number
  • ’/,\,#,?’ characters are not allowed in values for the PartitionKey and RowKey properties.
  • Only a total of 256 characters can be specified for the partition key and row key together on the URL.
  • With version 2009-04-14, the Table service no longer supports including the dash (-) character in property names.

Queues

Messages

  • 8 KB Max(It converts Messages in base 64 then stores that message in cloud.)
  • Messages pushed to end of queue and popped from front of queue (FIFO)
  • Unlimited number of messages

Queue Name

  • Valid DNS name
  • All Lowercase
  • 3 to 63 Characters –
  • Start With a Letter or Number
  • Letters, Numbers, and Dash (-)
  • First and Last Letters Must be Alphanumeric
  • Dash (-) character may not be the first or last letter

All Storage Timeouts

Following are the maximum timeouts allowed for Windows Azure Storage operations

  • GetBlob – A get bob request is allowed to take up to 2 minutes per MByte transferred, before the server side times out.
  • PutBlob – A put bob request is allowed to take up to 10 minutes per MByte transferred, before the server side times out.
  • PutBlockList and GetBlockList – These have a max timeout of 60 seconds.
  • Table Query and All List Operations – Current max timeout is 60 seconds. In the future this will be changed to 30 seconds.
  • All other commands in Blobs, Tables and Queues have a max timeout of 30 seconds.

[Upadate-August-2009] The max timeout is now 30 seconds for listing Blobs, Blob Containers and Queues and for performing Table Queries.

Maximum Items Per Request

  • Can return upto 1000 Tables per request.
  • Can return upto 1000 Entites of a Tanle per request.
  • Can return upto 5000 Queues per request.
  • Can return upto 5000 Containers per request.
  • Can return upto 5000 Blobs per request.