Playing with Azure and SQL Data Services: No "Random Access Paging"

Andrew Nurse — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 21:20:31 GMT

So, I've started playing around with the whole Azure Services Platform (http://www.azure.com), now that school's done :) and I thought I'd blog about things I discover along the way.

My first idea was to create a simple blogging engine in MVC that would store data in SQL Data Services and run in Windows Azure (I got my invite code recently, yay!). However, I soon discovered that would be difficult. It turns out that while SQL Data Services does support "Paging" the results of a query so that you don't retrieve every result in one batch, it does not support what I refer to as "Random Access Paging". Random Access Paging (and I'm sure theres some other term for it) basically means providing a page index and page size to the data layer and having it retrieve just that page (i.e. Skip/Take in LINQ). There are some solutions, but most of them requrire that you step through each page sequentially, rather than just being able to request a page.

Of course, I may be missing something. So, if you know how I could solve this problem, feel free to post in the comments!

In a blogging engine, this is practically a necessity, since you only want to display a certain number of posts per page. So I've tabled that idea for now.

My next idea: An RSS reader which stores your set of subscribed feeds in your Live Mesh (though I don't have access to that CTP yet).

VibrantCode - Azure

Playing with Azure and SQL Data Services: No "Random Access Paging"