Blob storage

In the Ultra Transcenders books

AZ-305AZ-104AZ-700SC-500AI-901AI-300AI-103

Each book explains 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.

• Block blob

  The blob type built from individual blocks, suited to text and binary files of up to roughly 190.7 TiB; access tiers and object replication work only with this type.

Related terms

• Azure Blob Storage events

  Notifications in Real-Time hub, for instance Microsoft.Storage.BlobCreated or Microsoft.Storage.BlobDeleted, that fire when a blob or directory changes in a general-purpose v2 or Blob Storage account. They describe changes rather than carrying business records, and can drive an eventstream or an Activator alert.

• Azure events

  One of the Real-Time hub's categories, listing system-level events emitted by Azure services (Blob Storage events, say). Each can be streamed into an eventstream, or Activator can raise alerts on it.

• BLOB

  Short for binary large object: raw binary data, like pictures, audio, video or documents, that only an application can make sense of. Azure keeps these files as blobs in Blob Storage.

• Container

  Something that groups data. Blob Storage containers sit inside a storage account and hold blobs much as folders hold files; Cosmos DB containers hold items and set the scope for partitioning and throughput.

• Data lake

  Holds files of every kind, structured, semi-structured or unstructured, usually spread over a distributed file system, and lets engines like Spark apply a schema when reading. In Azure this is Data Lake Storage: Blob Storage with a hierarchical namespace enabled.

• Encryption scopes

  Encryption keys applied per blob or per container, layered over the account's own encryption; available for blob storage only.

• Event Hubs Capture

  Automatically saves Event Hubs data as Avro files in ADLS Gen2 or Blob Storage, cutting a file whenever a size or time window is reached.

• GCS

  Object storage offered by Google Cloud. Alongside Amazon S3, ADLS and Blob Storage, it is a source Auto Loader can ingest from.