Previous Posts to this post
 
Previous Blog Posts Link
Supporting Billions of entities/rows for Mobile – Android Series - Part 1 - Why Scale Matters http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/09/27/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-1-why-scale-matters.aspx
Supporting Billions of entities/rows for Mobile – Android Series - Part 2 - What are some high level cloud offerings? http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/09/27/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-2-what-are-some-high-level-cloud-offerings.aspx
Free download link for Azure lahxjo2d
   
  Let’s talk architecture

  		At this point we are ready to write some code. Let’s just show a couple of diagrams to kind of give you the picture about what we are trying to do.

What we are talking about is the “Service Provider” section. We are about to create a web service in the “Windows Azure” section of the cloud diagram below.

This diagram depicts an easy way to think about the style of architecture for today’s applications. You have “consumers” as well as “providers” of data. The “middleware” glues these two worlds together and makes it possible to add basic services as the data spans both worlds.

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  Accessing Table data from the cloud
 
This diagram depicts how we we implement our system.


Notice the “Solution Explorer” for Visual Studio.


It represents our project and code that is running the Azure Data Center (The Microsoft Cloud)		 fzk2jhhr
  Storage options
  Here is a breakdown of the options:
Blobs File system in the cloud
Tables Massively scalable structured storage (key / value pairs)
Queues Reliable storage and delivery of messages
Drives Durable NTFS volumes for Windows Azure applications
SQL Azure A relational database hosted in the cloud that can hold up to 50GB (9/27/2011)
  Which data store is appropriate for you?
  Here is a summary of their uses:
Binary Large Object (BLOB) Service The simplest way to store text or binary data with Windows Azure.

Think about large videos, images, pdfs, zip files.
Table Service Is better for large amounts of data that need additional structure, which works exceptionally well with applications that need to work with data in a very detailed manner via queries.

This is the data store that I will demonstrate in this post.

The Table service offers structured storage in the form of tables.

The Table service API is a REST API for working with tables and the data that they contain. The API is a Windows-based framework that you can access from most languages that run under Windows.
Queue Service Is for reliable, persistent messaging between Web and Worker role instances.
Windows Azure Drive Allows Windows Azure applications to mount a Page Blob, which is a single volume NTFS VHD. This allows applications to upload/download VHDs via blob
  Performance Tips for Azure tables
 
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Click here to get Azure performance tips
  Additional resources for storage
 
Description Link
Summary of Table Service Functionality http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd135720.aspx
Overview of Windows Azure Storage http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/features/storage/
Table Service REST API http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd179423.aspx
Security Resources for Windows Azure http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff934690.aspx
   
  Your account drives the URL of the various storage abstractions
  You can see how the RESTful interfaces map to the specific storage types.

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  Our RESTful service will leverage Tables
 
Scalable Structured Storage Store Tables with billions of entities and TBs of data.
Provides flexible schema (NoSQL).
Data Model A table is a set of entities (rows).
An entity is a set of properties (columns)
Familiar and Easy to use API OData Protocol.
WCF Data Services - .NET classes and LINQ
  RESTful data
 
Description Link
Windows Azure Storage Services REST API Reference http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/dd179355.aspx#
Table Service REST API http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/dd179423.aspx#
Blob Service REST API http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/dd135733.aspx#
Queue Service REST API http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/dd179363.aspx#
   

  Key Whitepapers
  Here is an excellent link to read more about Windows Azure.
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Important Link Address
Windows Azure Platform Whitepaper Downloads http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/whitepaperdownload/
   

  Next steps
 
Step Description
Part 4 Building a cloud-based, RESTful service
Part 5 Building an Android client that consumes the RESTful data