This post is part of a series of posts that aims to capture a number of emerging design patterns for the Windows Azure Platform. This series will begin with emerging design patterns for Windows Azure Table storage. The Chronological Query Pattern aims to support queries that must return data in chronological or reverse chronological order. Example Looking at a standard example of blog data, stored as: PartitionKey (User) RowKey Titl ... [Read more]

This post is part of a series of posts that aims to capture a number of emerging design patterns for the Windows Azure Platform. This series will begin by tackling emerging design patterns for Windows Azure Table storage. The Starts With Query Pattern enables performance optimised begins with partial match operations. Example Provide a fast search for articles that begins with the term “Metabolis” from a list of article titles, such as those found on Wikipedia. A subset is shown below: Me ... [Read more]

This post is part of a series of posts that aims to capture a number of emerging design patterns for the Windows Azure Platform. This series will begin by tackling emerging design patterns for Windows Azure Table storage. The Transactional Master-Item Record Pattern ensures that modifications to a master record and its item records are performed in a transactional way. Example Changes to an expense record with expense line items is an set of data that needs to be managed in a transaction w ... [Read more]

This post is part of a series of posts that aims to capture a number of emerging design patterns for the Windows Azure Platform. This series will begin with emerging design patterns for Windows Azure Table storage. The Table Name Key Pattern enables the key for an entity to be extended beyond the partition key and row key, to provide faster querying or deletion/archiving. Example Data with short lifetime such as log or diagnostic data or temporary working sets, are generally only needed fo ... [Read more]

The Hash Partitioning Pattern aims to improve the performance of parallel and batch queries. Example As part of the pre-processing done for Wikipedia Explorer, the HTML/XML representation of a Wikipedia page is converted in to a set of POCO objects and the incoming and outbound links are analysed. The core data is stored in a Windows Azure Table and is used when pre-processing a page, which is a massively CPU intensive operation. As optimisations this work is done in parallel and is also fo ... [Read more]

Well it’s the 21 century, after a great deal of effort, hardship and toil, they have finally done it. What is the “it” I’m talking about? Design! Yes, after many years of the design of applications being a second class citizen Microsoft has been kind enough to upgrade us to partners in the development of software (all be it silent partners who only have a 5 per cent share of the company and only pop in for tea and biscuits occasionally). But lets face it, it’s more than any other company h ... [Read more]

With hindsight this technique is so similar to some other more advanced patterns I couldn't believe that I couldn't find it documented anywhere. I'd expect this is due to my using a different internal glossary to other people, nevertheless before finding this solution it looked hard, and afterward it seemed beautifully simple. Intent Send cross domain messages such as deep link requests to a named browser window. Do not interrupt existing playback of video etc. on the page. Motivation Ext ... [Read more]