Practical Use of Tables and Indexes

Abstract

When people imagine a table, in most of the cases, this looks like an Excel spreadsheet. There are a bunch of cells organized in rows and columns, and there is usually one column that contains the identifiers of the rows. Azure SQL enables you to use much more than a plain table. You can configure and optimize your table for some specific query patterns, complex analytics, or highly concurrent updates. You can also configure your tables to keep a full history of changes, implement some parts of domain data-integrity logic, and apply fine-grained security rules. In this chapter, you can find some practical advice that can help you leverage the features that Azure SQL provides to create a table that is best fit for your needs.