Want to get your name in a free Azure tips eBook?

Comments 0

Share to social media

As I’ve been working with Windows Azure for a few years now there’s a few things I wish I knew when I started out. If you’ve got similar tips that you’d like to share we’re putting together a free eBook of 50 tips for Azure Storage and we want your tips.

If you submit a tip and it’s included in the book fame and fortune will be yours (I may be exaggerating the last bit). Your name will be in the book – after all, it was your tip.

So how do you get involved I hear you cry?

Simple – send an email to melanie.townsend@red-gate.com with your tip and we’ll get back to you. She has kindly offered to pull the tips together, so be nice.

What does a tip look like?

Well we’re looking for tips on 5 topics: SQL Azure, Blob storage, Table storage, Queue storage and Diagnostics & Logging.

These tips should be short – only a couple of sentences of text, so for example…

Tip 1: Ensure all tables in SQL Azure have a clustered index

It may be a simple thing but you won’t notice anything isn’t working until you attempt to insert into a table and by then it’s generally too late.

Tip 2: Keep all services in a single data center to keep costs down

In Azure you are charged when data leaves a data center. So in practical terms if you have a load storage, queues, SQL Azure and compute instances you want to make sure they are all in the same data center.

Tip 3: Think hard before using Azure Table storage to get the most out of it

Azure Table storage is a very neat way of storing more unstructured data although really consider how you’re going to partition your data beforehand. There are no indexes above PartitionKey and RowKey so be sure to optimize your data storage for retrieval. It’s not designed to be just like a database table, it’s very different and powerful in different ways.

How do I get involved again? This looks like a great idea!

Melanie would love to hear your tips so we can take the best and put them in the book, just send an email to melanie.townsend@red-gate.com she’s really rather friendly.

Load comments

About the author

Richard Mitchell

See Profile

Richard Mitchell founded Cherry Safe Software Ltd which is an Azure hosted backup solution. Previously he worked for Redgate Software as a project manager and dev and is responsible for many sins. When not working he messes about with 3D printers and hitting things with hammers.

Richard Mitchell's contributions