Question

Currently I’m using the PartitionKey to differentiate devices that are storing data into Azure Table Services. I’d like to build a viewer that allows me to browse that data, but it would be nice to be able to structure it so I can view data “by device”, or by PartitionKey. The viewer app won’t have any knowledge of what devices exist, so it would be great if I could somehow get back a list of distinct PartionKeys in a given Table. Is this possible, or am I going to be relegated to creating a meta-data table into which I insert a new row for each device, then use that for querying?

Answer 1

I don’t think there is a way to retrieve all the partition keys. Here’s a clever workaround, though: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/archive/blogs/avkashchauhan/retrieving-partition-key-range-in-windows-azure-table-storage

To quote from Avkash’s blog:

Digging further, I found there is no built in API to get a list of
partition keys, instead I would have to create a solution for myself.
So I end up inserting a single dummy row into each partition and when
I wanted to get a list of partition keys I just query for those dummy
items and they gave me the list I was looking for.

I’m certain you will already have seen this, but for others who may happen on this question, I think this is the best guide to table service functionality: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/storage-dotnet-how-to-use-tables/ with examples and links to the detailed API docs.