Question

Is it possible to limit the size of an Azure Table Storage table? I’m using it for storing logs. Also how can I do something like, when the limit is reached, the old entries are deleted to make space for the new ones? Something like capped collections for MongoDB or Round-robin databases?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Somewhat remarkably: no, there’s no way (currently) to do this that I’m aware of.

We had the same situation, and we now use the Cerebrata Diagnostics Manager (http://cerebrata.com/Products/AzureDiagnosticsManager/) to purge them periodically.

It is also possible to explicitly drop the WAD* tables, but you may see issues if you have an instance still running when you do this. From http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-AU/windowsazuretroubleshooting/thread/3329834a-ddae-4180-b787-ceb7aee16e83:

@Sam –> I would be careful about deleting the table. Deleting the
WAD* table is a viable option if you don’t have too much data in it.
What happens when you delete a table is that it is not deleted at that
very moment however it is marked for deletion and some background
process actually deletes that table. If you (or the diagnostics
process) try to create the same table you would get an error that
“Table is being deleted”.

You can also use Visual Studio to purge logs from a given time: the above link includes a way to do that. I have a feeling that a Powershell script could also be written to do this.