Gaurav Mantri's Personal Blog.

Comparing Windows Azure Table Storage and Amazon SimpleDB–Summary

Over the past few weeks, I have been writing a detailed blog post comparing Windows Azure Table Storage and Amazon SimpleDB. You can read that post here: https://gauravmantri.com/2012/04/21/comparing-windows-azure-table-storage-and-amazon-simpledb/. This blog post summarizes the comparison.

Like the other post, for the sake of brevity we’re going to refer Windows Azure Table Storage as WATS and Amazon SimpleDB as ASDB in the rest of this blog post as well.

Following table provides a comparison summary of features in WATS and ASDB.

WATS ASDB
Current service version 2011-08-18 2009-04-15
NoSQL database Yes Yes
Consumption based pricing Yes Yes
Only pay for the data stored Yes Yes
Pay for transactions Yes Yes
Pay for data ingress No No
Pay for data egress Yes Yes
Indexing support Partial Full
Consistency model Strongly Eventual
Ability to create tables/domains Yes Yes
Minimum/Maximum length of a table/domain 3/63 3/255
Case Sensitivity Mixed case Mixed case
Valid Characters Alphanumeric Alphanumeric, Dash (-), Hyphen (_) and Period (.)
Is create operation idempotent No Yes
Maximum number of tables/domains N/A 250
Maximum size of a table/domain N/A 10 GB
Maximum number of attributes across all tables/domains N/A 1 Billion
Ability to fetch list of tables/domains Yes Yes
Maximum number of tables/domains returned per call to the service 1000 100
Returns continuation token in case more tables/domains are available Yes Yes
Ability to delete tables/domains Yes Yes
Is delete operation idempotent No Yes
Ability to get metadata about a table/domain like number of entities/items, size of table/domain etc. No Yes
Ability to create an entity/item in a table/domain Yes Yes
Maximum number of attributes per entity/item 256 256
Maximum number of custom attributes per entity/item 253 256
Attribute data type One of eight data types String
Maximum size of an entity/item 1 MB 256 KB
Maximum size of an attribute value N/A 1 KB
Ability to update an entity/item in a table/domain Yes Yes
Supports conditional updates Yes Yes
Ability to delete an entity/item from a table/domain Yes Yes
Is delete operation idempotent No Yes
Ability to get all attributes of an entity/item Yes Yes
Ability to get selected attributes of an entity/item Yes Yes
Ability to perform batch operations on multiple entities/items Yes Yes
Ability to query tables/domains Yes Yes
Maximum number of entities/items returned per call 1000 2500
Default number of entities/items returned per call 1000 100
Maximum size of response payload N/A 1 MB
System can time out queries Yes Yes
Maximum execution time after which a query will be timed out by the system 5 Seconds 5 Seconds
Possibility of system returning partial records Yes Yes
Supports custom ordering of query result No Yes

I hope you will find this information useful.


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