Auto-increment on Azure Table Storage

Question

I am currently developing an application for Azure Table Storage. In that application I have table which will have relatively few inserts (a couple of thousand/day) and the primary key of these entities will be used in another table, which will have billions of rows.

Therefore I am looking for a way to use an auto-incremented integer, instead of GUID, as primary key in the small table (since it will save lots of storage and scalability of the inserts is not really an issue).

There've been some discussions on the topic, e.g. on http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/windowsazure/thread/6b7d1ece-301b-44f1-85ab-eeb274349797.

However, since concurrency problems can be really hard to debug and spot, I am a bit uncomfortable with implementing this on own. My question is therefore if there is a well tested impelemntation of this?

Answer 1

For everyone who will find it in search, there is a better solution. Minimal time for table lock is 15 seconds - that's awful. Do not use it if you want to create a truly scalable solution. Use Etag!

Create one entity in table for ID (you can even name it as ID or whatever).

1) Read it.

2) Increment.

3) InsertOrUpdate WITH ETag specified (from the read query).

if last operation (InsertOrUpdate) succeeds, then you have a new, unique, auto-incremented ID. If it fails (exception with HttpStatusCode == 412), it means that some other client changed it. So, repeat again 1,2 and 3. The usual time for Read+InsertOrUpdate is less than 200ms. My test utility with source on github.

Answer 2

See UniqueIdGenerator class by Josh Twist.