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Comment by ResidentSleeper | Hacker News Reader

That's sad to hear. I've had a lot of fun playing around with Azure's table/blob storage services. Never deployed a large production app with them, but the performance seemed decent (eg. when using table storage as a json store). I did look at Cosmos DB but decided not to give it a try when I saw the pricing.

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I like their table/blob and queue storage, but maybe it's because it's relatively mature and the domain is well understood. Most of the comparable services from other providers are generic analogs.

I'm not sure I feel much different across Azure Cosmos and Aws Dynamo. It seems super-easy to get locked into a relatively expensive proprietary offering in each case.

I second this, Azure Table Storage is an amazing product, but would be a more powerful one if they enable indexing on all columns and also any automatic backup options, which are only available on CosmosDB Table, which makes me thing that Azure wants to push me to use CosmosDB if I want those features, since they don't have a roadmap for this for the Azure Table Storage.

These are two very different products at two very different price points.

10TB of Table storage is 655$ 10TB of CosmosDb is 2500$

Azure Table storage is a key/value store similar to Hbase, Cassandra, GCP Bigtable, AWS DynamoDB and others. It's a very stable and scalable design which is why everyone has some version of it.

There's no way to add indexes to this data model, it's all done by just writing your data in another table using the key you want and the value pointing to the original table's row. Perhaps Azure could offer secondary indexes like AWS DynamoDB does but it's probably too complex of a feature to add at this point, which is why it took DynamoDB several years to get to working GSI.

Having the azure table storage be indexed into azure search with an azure function as the indexer delivers a pretty powerful alternative that isn't exactly batteries included, but close.

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