Programming Windows Azure

Chapter 11. Common Storage Tasks

Over the years, developers have built up a body of knowledge when it comes to interacting with data from storage systems. Developers know how to perform pagination, handle master-child relationships, conduct a full-text search, and perform several other tasks used in almost every website or service.

When switching to cloud storage services, it isn’t immediately apparent how to do the same things. This chapter plugs that gap by walking you through the process of performing some common, day-to-day activities that you are probably extremely familiar with on a typical relational database management system (RDBMS).

Exploring Full-Text Search

Let’s get something out of the way upfront. Windows Azure storage does not support full-text search out of the box. This section walks you through how you can build a trivial full-text search yourself to work around this limitation.

Understanding Full-Text Search

Imagine that you’re implementing a search engine for your website. You could write some simple database queries to search your content. You might use the LIKE operator in SQL to do simple pattern matching against the search queries. However, you’ll soon find out that this breaks down even in simple searches.

The terms users search for may not appear together. Users may search for variants of the term taxes where your database has only tax, or players where your database has only player. Since everyone is familiar with Google, your users will expect these search ...