I'm designing an application using Azure Storage Blobs/Table/Queue, handling massive amount of data. One important aspect of the application, is that work will be done if a given key don't exist, and determining the existence of a key is a frequent and intensive task.
I need to optimize as much possible billable transactions from existence checks of keys. It could be either against blobs or tables.
I looked at this document Understanding Windows Azure Storage Billing – Bandwidth, Transactions, and Capacity It seems that 404 errors are not counted only from anonymous requests.
I was also thinking of using a BatchTableOperation to check 100 keys at once, maybe using a Replace or Merge, and determine in the results if the key indeed existed (haven't tried, actualy I got the idea while writing)
Any good hack are welcomed.