Background
At work we’re invested heavily in Microsoft Azure. We have stayed very true to the entire Azure stack and as a result we’re using their table storage to store logs.
The big idea of course is that whenever something happens in our code, we just write it to a table in Azure.
Problem
I’m sure after a year or so I might like Azure’s table storage, but for now I hate it. Even as I’m writing this, I can’t believe there are pretty much _no_ tools to query or browse the contents of a given table.
There is a project called Azure Storage Explorer, but it stinks. It’s incredibly slow and isn’t the most intuitive UI.
There is also a Linqpad driver, but the functionality is minimal.
For me, the root problem is that Azure table storage – when queried – will only return one page of data at a time. Each page is 1,000 records. From my experience you can’t even be guaranteed that the first 1,000 you get is the most recent 1,000.
All I want to do is see all the data stored!
Solution
The guy that wrote the Linqpad Azure storage driver put it up on Github, so in true open source spirit, I forked it!
In a little less than an hour I had modified the driver, tested it in Linqpad and updated the code on Github.
I’m so, so, so excited now that I can get all log records in Linqpad.
