Auto-increment on Azure Table Storage

Yrlec_71354 0
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I am currently developing an application for Azure Table Storage. In that application I have table which will have relatively few inserts (a couple of thousand/day) and the primary key of these entities will be used in another table, which will have billions of rows.

Therefore I am looking for a way to use an auto-incremented integer, instead of GUID, as primary key in the small table (since it will save lots of storage and scalability of the inserts is not really an issue).

There've been some discussions on the topic, e.g. on http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/windowsazure/thread/6b7d1ece-301b-44f1-85ab-eeb274349797.

However, since concurrency problems can be really hard to debug and spot, I am a bit uncomfortable with implementing this on own. My question is therefore if there is a well tested impelemntation of this?

azure-storage identity-column primary-key auto-increment concurrency
5 Answers

If you really need to avoid guids, have you considered using something based on date/time and then leveraging partition keys to minimize the concurrency risk.

Your partition key could be by user, year, month, day, hour, etc and the row key could be the rest of the datetime at a small enough timespan to control concurrency.

Of course you have to ask yourself, at the price of date in Azure, if avoiding a Guid is really worth all of this extra effort (assuming a Guid will just work).

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