Microsoft Azure Data Solutions - An Introduction

Chapter 2

Implement data-storage solutions

There is a lot of data out there that cannot be stored in a structural way. For example, the Word document in which this chapter was written has no common structure with other documents delivered for this book, like scripts, plan data, notebooks, and so on. So, they are impossible to store in the same table unless you consider a table with a column for the title and another for the content. This would be a very poor structure for a relational database!

This kind of content — and others like plain text, comma-separated values, Java Script Object Notation (JSON), graph structures, and binary content like audio, video, and pictures — require special platforms to store them in. In many cases, they will ...