When should I use Sql Azure and when should I use table Storage?

Question

When should i use Sql Azure and when should I use table Storage? I was thinking , use table storage for transaction processing scenarios e.g. debit credit accounts kind of

Answer 1

Some of these answers don't seem complete, so I'll add my 2 cents.

Azure Table's Good points:

• Strong point is its ability to store lots of little data; Azure table is based on Azure Blob, but is geared towards smaller data
• Much cheaper than Azure SQL Server
• Anytime you know both the partition key and the row key, the data access is very fast.
• Entity transactions are possible if you place two different "schemas" in the same partition key.
• Where the total row size is LESS THAN 980K (SQL Row)
• Where each property is LESS THAN 64K (SQL Column)
• It can act as a poor man's SQL.

Azure table's bad points:

• SQL is the weak point. Don't expect to use this on any large SQL table or you will suffer performance issues.
• Limited SQL is available, don't expect joins of any type, besides what you implement in Linq
• Azure Table SQL doesn't scale as well as its ability to store an infinite amount of data
• Anytime you don't specify both a partition key and row key in a WHERE clause, expect a slow table scan to occur
• Expect table scan performance to degrade as you add more rows
• Don't expect Azue Table queries to be fast as you add more rows
• Bottom line, if you're using Azure Table to act like SQL don't add lots of data. If you have lots of data (gigabytes), just don't plan on getting high-performance SQL queries against it. You will be saving money if you don't need those regular SQL features.