Blob Container Partitioning

Question

I'm expecting to store thousands of small to medium size files for thousands of users in Azure Blob Storage. Given Neil's following statement taken from another thread:

The hierarchical structure in Azure Blobs is only one level deep - the container. However, Azure Blobs supports a simulation of a deeper structure by providing support for multiple delimiters in a blob name. For example, you can name a blob folder/secondLevelFolder/thirdLevelFolder/fileName.txt to simulate a multi-level folder structure

I assume that organizing the blobs in a directory per user would provide no performance benefits since the folder structure below the container is just syntactic sugar. Is that correct?

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weichhold.com

Answer 1

Hi Oliver,

You may find this blog post by Brad Calder useful: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2010/05/10/windows-azure-storage-abstractions-and-their-scalability-targets.aspx.

In general I think storing blobs in a directory per use would give you some performance benefits as you can use the user identifier as blob prefix and get only the blobs associated with that user instead of listing blobs for all users and then do a filtering in your application.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

Gaurav Mantri

Cerebrata Software

http://www.cerebrata.com

 

Answer 2

Hi Oliver,

You may find this blog post by Brad Calder useful: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2010/05/10/windows-azure-storage-abstractions-and-their-scalability-targets.aspx.

In general I think storing blobs in a directory per use would give you some performance benefits as you can use the user identifier as blob prefix and get only the blobs associated with that user instead of listing blobs for all users and then do a filtering in your application.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

Gaurav Mantri

Cerebrata Software

http://www.cerebrata.com

 

Yes that would probably the case if I would ever enumerate them but I maintain the references to those blobs in Table Storage.

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weichhold.com

Answer 3

If you are storing the blobs URL in Table storage, then I don't think it would make any difference as at all times you will be accessing the blobs directly by their links instead of enumerating over the list to get the blobs you want.

Thanks

Gaurav