Support for Tables

[azure]

Support for Tables

[seguler]

Hello folks - I am a product manager on the Azure Storage engineering team and would like to clarify a few things here. Currently, there are no plans to deprecate the Azure Table Storage service, it is just our colleagues at CosmosDB (@wmengmsft) is now responsible for releasing Table libraries, and have not yet released a library in this new design. The issue is just a matter of time to be addressed, and will certainly not persist forever :)

Rest assured we are working on unifying the SDK story across Azure, and aim to provide the same design for each Azure service. We also plan to move this repository to a unified Azure SDK repository in the future just like you (@EisenbergEffect) expect.

[EisenbergEffect]

It's just a shame that if you need table storage you have to use the legacy SDK 😢 If you are the PM for this library, please track support for tables as a customer request or pass this along to the person who is the PM.

More broadly speaking, it's definitely more customer-friendly, and more competitive with Amazon/Google to have a unified, modern set of JS libraries for all of Azure. What I would expect is a monorepo with packages for each azure service written in TypeScript with consistency of types and API styles across all of Azure. If there's someone I need to talk to to convince them of this, please point me in the right direction.

Thanks!

[EisenbergEffect]

@XiaoningLiu Can you expound on why it's not planned? Is it simply a matter of resources? or are Tables being phased out or something like that? I'm planning to use Tables in an app so I just want to make sure I'm making decisions that aren't going to cause me problems down the road.

[JonSilver]

Currently, there are no plans to deprecate the Azure Table Storage service, it is just our colleagues at CosmosDB (@wmengmsft) is now responsible for releasing Table libraries, and have not yet released a library in this new design. The issue is just a matter of time to be addressed, and will certainly not persist forever :)

@seguler Over a year later and nothing has visibly changed from outside. Please provide a clear update on what's happening here. Someone must own the problem.

In that year a lot has changed externally, including the deprecation of a core component of the now very aged v2 SDK. Something needs to be done soon.

[MaximRouiller]

Currently writing a blog post about writing a workaround for this.

My workaround looks like this for every method I need to invoke:

async function queryEntities(tableService, ...args) {
    return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
        let promiseHandling = (err, result) => {
            if (err) {
                reject(err);
            } else {
                resolve(result);
            }
        };
        args.push(promiseHandling);
        tableService.queryEntities.apply(tableService, args);
    });
};

[chadbr]

This is kind of crazy to me... if someone wants to target Azure Stack -- the only option is this package and this package has been deprecated.

There's not even a roadmap of how someone can do modern JS development to target Azure Stack... (because there's not a roadmap I guess).

To top it off - there seems to be nobody to complain to... CosmosDB people say "sorry, no azure stack" -- you guys say "sorry, talk to the cosmos guys"...

Not a good place to be.

[franz-josef-kaiser]

@seguler and @XiaoningLiu Can you PLEASE commit a note about the SDK and Table Storage to the README? Me and several others had to invest a non insignificant amount of time to dig into all sorts of routes to find the info

• that the CosmosDB team is responsible now
• that one should use the v2 legacy API for now

…and we are just the ones who cared to write this here. In case you want to get into details or discussions, ping me on this thread at Twitter.

[XiaoningLiu]

It's a non technical decision. Already forwarded feedback to our PM. Thanks for supporting.

[franz-josef-kaiser]

Hi @XiaoningLiu , thanks for taking the time to comment here and your interest in improving the state of things.
After you pointing to the table, I can see what you mean. As you can see, one has to scroll horizontally to get to this bit of information. And then, they have to carefully read. Opposite to this hidden treasure, there's a big note above the table:

This README page is a reference to the SDK v2. For the new SDK v10, go to Storage SDK v10 for JavaScript.

To me (and probably to most others), this meant "Go, look elsewhere! This is deprecated and only here as legacy reference". Maybe you can provide a second line below that:

…unless you are searching for a SDK for Table Storage. Then this repo is for you.

About v12: I didn't even get to the point that there is a v12 in the pipeline. Maybe you want to inform users in all the places (v2 GH repo, v10 GH repos and your docs) in a prominent place, that there's a roadmap for v12. Maybe you can even tell who's in charge and where to ping people. This might even help to gather feedback during preview/ alpha/ beta releases.

Thanks again!

[XiaoningLiu]

@EisenbergEffect

Thanks for your feedback.
Table is not planned in the scope of this repository, please use the legacy SDK. Will update if there are any updates.

[XiaoningLiu]

@EisenbergEffect @szul Table support is just not planned as the scope of this repository. It will not affect the table service.

[szul]

@EisenbergEffect The Bot Framework team seemed to imply that removing ATS support in the BotBuilder libraries was a matter of team bandwidth. It just surprises me to see this newer Azure storage SDK also seem to infer the same thing, since this is the official NodeJS repo 😕

[yannick-mamudo]

+1 Would also love to see table support on V10 or at least a notice if the rumors on ATS deprecation are true.

[EisenbergEffect]

If there is a plan to deprecate ATS, I'd certainly like to know ASAP.

[szul]

Seconded. The Bot Framework Node.JS SDK dropped ATS support with the v4 release. If this is going to be a thing across the board, and Microsoft is phasing out ATS, please let the community know.

[szul]

@XiaoningLiu Much appreciated.

[EisenbergEffect]

@seguler Thank you so much for following up! We all get a little nervous when we consider something possibly going away that we have critical dependencies on. It's great to hear that Azure Table Storage is sticking around. Also, great news on the unified SDK. I'm looking forward to that and if you need any community peer review on that, I'm happy to contribute as well. Cheers!

[szul]

+ 1 to @EisenbergEffect. I have a couple of applications where I'm going all-in on ATS. Relieved to know it's still a priority.

[XiaoningLiu]

Hi @franz-josef-kaiser Sorry for the inconvenient experiences. Which readme file are your refering to?

In the readme of legacy V2 https://www.npmjs.com/package/azure-storage, there are descriptions showing table service support is only in legacy v2 SDK.

For more backgrounds here. From V10 and V12, all lanaguages of Azure Storage SDKs are taking same design guideline and architecture to provide a unified experiences, you can find out the APIs or models are almost aligned corss different languages. And from V12, all Azure JS SDKs move to central repo.

[XiaoningLiu]

Hi @franz-josef-kaiser Thanks for your suggestion! We should bring the message in a more highlight way especially for table users.

The thing is, we don't release a new npm package azure-storage with only the readme changes, as no code changes. So the npm package leaves as it is. We will see if other places we can hightlight the message.

[XiaoningLiu]

Hi Guys, the track2 SDK(s) for Storage Table is under working now, please expect them in this summer.

Add @ramya-rao-a for more comments.

[chadbr]

@ramya-rao-a that's great news -- will it support Azure Stack?

[XiaoningLiu]

Azure Stack should provide same RESTful API interfaces like storage Table API. Then it will be supported.

…

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