A while back Amy Nicholson and I kicked off TechDays Online with our session “Data, data, data – How and Where to store it on Azure?”.

The idea was to look at the different data stores and repositories that exist on Microsoft Azure, and to match them to the differing requirements of developers and their applications.

We live in an era of polyglot persistence and there is no need to force ourselves to use just one store in an application or solution, when a variety of options exist, and exist as services on Azure, so there is no need to set up and manage virtual machines, just hook up the services and start using them.

One simple example is a system that has a mix of both human and machine derived data:

The sales data for a company is most likely to be in a SQL ACID transactional database (such as SQL Database), whereas the audit logs would be in a cheap, fast, non-relational store (such as Azure Table storage).