Azure's service for huge volumes of unstructured objects like documents, pictures, video, backups and logs. A storage account contains containers, which contain blobs, and everything is accessed over HTTPS or HTTP.
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In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Azure Blob Storage in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- LIKE
Compares strings with a pattern that can contain the % and _ wildcards. Because it only understands character patterns, searching big volumes of text this way is much slower than using full-text search.
- Storage account
The top-level resource in Azure Storage, giving a unique namespace for table, queue, file and blob data. Location, performance and kind are set when it is created and cannot change.
- CONTAINS
Searches columns with a full-text index for words, phrases, prefixes, inflected forms or synonyms; you use it as a predicate in
WHERE. - OVER
Gives a T-SQL window function its window: PARTITION BY, ORDER BY and, if wanted, a ROWS or RANGE frame. Rankings and running totals can then be worked out while every row is kept.
- HTTPS
Secure HTTP, wrapped in TLS. VCF products serve their web UIs and REST APIs this way on 443.
- HTTP
Hypertext Transfer Protocol, which sends data in clear text; VCF interfaces and APIs instead use HTTPS.
Related terms
- Database digest
Represents the state of all ledger tables in a database as one hash of the ledger's newest block. You can store it by hand or have it saved automatically to Azure Confidential Ledger or immutable Azure Blob Storage, then use it to verify the ledger later.
- Direct copy
Loading a Fabric warehouse by having the Copy activity call the COPY statement straight against Parquet or delimited text files held in Azure Blob Storage or ADLS Gen2, with no intermediate step. If the format or settings aren't supported, staged copy has to be used instead.
- File system view
When you point Power Query at a folder-type source (a local folder, a SharePoint folder, Azure Blob storage or Azure Data Lake Storage), it returns a listing in which each file appears once, holding its contents as a binary value plus metadata like its name, file type and path.
- Unstructured data
Information with no set data model, like logs, video, images, documents and other text or binary files. Azure Blob Storage is the service designed to store it.