The BLOB blog

In today’s world of big data, finding ways to store and retrieve it can prove to be a challenge. Gone are the days of just needing to keep words and numbers stored in your databases.  Now we need images, videos, documents, and other non-structured data to be kept and maintained.  So we have BLOBs (Binary Large Objects).

BLOBs are able to hold these things in a single entity within the DBMS (database management system). For example, a photo album could be stored within a database using the blob data type for the photos and the string data type for the captions. So once we’ve made our BLOB how do we store and access it? 

Microsoft Azure has BLOB storage solutions for all levels of users. With this service your BLOBs can be accessed from anywhere in the world through the web.  Azure Blob Storage has become a very popular storage mechanism for storing website resources such as images, documents and videos. The large gamut of scenarios that Azure Blob Storage is a good fit for doesn’t stop at websites. It is also a good proponent for streaming data, distributed systems and data backup and recovery just to name a few.

Azure BLOB Storage comes with some added benefits as well.  Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.  Three (at minimum) complete replications of your data will be accessible at any time.   This gives assurance that if one facility should be down, there are at least two more options to access your data.   Pricing is based off of three factors: storage capacity, transactions, and outbound data (data egress). Simply put, you only pay for what you use.  As an added bonus Azure can even differentiate between hot and cold BLOBs and sort them accordingly to even further lower storage costs.

As we continue to need to store more and more unstructured data Microsoft Azure Blob Storage will be essential in aiding its safe and dependable retrieval.