Introduction
Storage selection is just as crucial as home selection. Your digital data has a sort of home in storage. It's where your data resides, grows, and returns after traveling to a temporary location. Any computing system must have the capacity to store data in files. On the hard drive of your computer and external storage devices like USB drives, files can be saved in local file systems; however, in most enterprises, crucial data files are kept centrally in a shared file storage system. As a result, vast amounts of data may be stored efficiently, securely, and dependably. This central storage site is increasingly housed in the cloud.
Azure Files is a shared storage solution that enables you to mount file shares on Windows, Linux, or Mac computers in the Azure cloud and access files using the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. Using the Azure File Sync agent, you may cache file shares on on-premises Windows Servers as well.
For many businesses, Azure File Storage has proven to be incredibly helpful, especially in "lift and shift" scenarios when it is necessary to migrate old on-premises programs to the cloud without adjustments. At the same time, several members of the community have expressed concerns about the Azure Files service's capacity to support demanding business needs. In this blog, we will discuss File storage in Microsoft Azure in greater detail.
File Formats Supported
Data storage file formats vary depending on a variety of factors, including:
- The data type that is being saved (structured, semi-structured, or unstructured).
- The software and services required to read, write, and process data.
- The need for the data files to be legible by people or optimized for effective processing and storage.
Below is a discussion of a few popular file types.
Delimited Text Files
Plain text files with defined field delimiters and row terminators are frequently used to hold data. Comma-separated values (CSV), in which fields are separated by commas and rows are terminated by carriage returns or new lines, is the most widely used format for delimited data. Other popular formats include fixed-width data, where each field is given a set amount of characters, tab-separated values (TSV), and space-delimited (in which tabs or spaces are used to divide fields). For structured data that must be accessible by a variety of applications and services in a human-readable manner, the delimited text is an excellent option.
Below, we see an example of delimited text file:
FirstName,LastName,Email
Joe,Jones,joe@litware.com
Samir,Nadoy,samir@northwind.comJSON (Javascript Object Notation)
In the widely used JSON format, data entities (objects) with various properties are defined using a hierarchical document structure. JSON is a versatile format that works well for both organized and semi-structured data since each attribute may be an object (or a group of objects). Below is an example of JSON Format:
{
"students":
[
{
"firstName": "Ray",
"lastName": "Woax",
"Grade":
[
{
"subject": "English",
"number": “A-"
},
{
"subject": "Mathematics",
"address": "A"
}
]
},
{
"firstName": "Luther",
"lastName": “Viktor”,
"contact":
[
{
"type": "Science",
"address": "A"
}
]
}
]
}Extensible Markup Language (XML)
In the 1990s and 2000s, XML, a human-readable data format, gained popularity. There are still some systems that utilise XML to express data even though the less verbose JSON format has mainly taken its place. As seen in the following example, XML employs tags contained in angle brackets (../>) to specify items and attributes:
Below, we see an example of XML file:
<Students>
<Student name="Ray" lastName="Woax">
<StudentDetails>
<Student subject="Mathematics" grade="A"/>
<Student subject="Science" grade="A-"/>
</StudentDetails>
</Studentr>
<Student name="Luther” lastName="Viktor">
<StudentDetails>
<Student subject="English" address="A"/>
</StudentDetails>
</Student>
</Students>BLOB (Binary Large Object)
All files are ultimately stored as binary data (1s and 0s), but the above-discussed human-readable formats convert the bytes of binary data to printable characters (typically through character encoding schemes such as ASCII or Unicode). However, other file formats, especially for unstructured data, retain the data as a raw binary that must be decoded and displayed by programs. Images, videos, music, and documents related to an application are examples of data that are frequently saved as binary data. Data experts frequently refer to the data files while working with this type of data as BLOBs (Binary Large Objects).
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