The App: Shifting Gears - The Database

So I thought I would just use Azure Table Storage for everything, given the fact that it's about $0.12 per gigabyte per month. Pretty awesome.

But Storage Tables only allow one index. Which means that I have to decide about how I want to query the data right up front and if I get it wrong, performance is going to suck.

Or, I copy the data multiple times, to multiple tables and manage my own indexes.

Ewww.

So I was digging around on the UserVoice site that Microsoft maintains for Table Storage and I saw a lot of people complaining about the lack of a second index and MS troops claiming they were going to do something about it.

Two years ago.

Ouch. Then I read that there haven't been any new enhancements in a while and that Microsoft was focusing on other tools. That's usually a bad sign for a product. I am sure that MS will keep Table Storage around for a long time as it's perfect for logging and Internet of Things apps and so on. It just won't get any new capabilities.

So I checked into their DocumentDb offering.

Well, everything is indexed. And you can scale to ludicrous sizes and you can easily do tons of things that would have been really difficult in Table Storage, nearly impossible in SQL.

So now, that's where we're going.

I have to figure out security, and partitioning, which I hope won't be show stoppers.

Let's see...