Azure storage table delete row by row key

Kurkula picture Kurkula · May 13, 2016 · Viewed 11.3k times · Source

I am trying to delete row from azure storage filter by only rowkey value. But I dont see any overload for delete operation where we can filter with only rowkey. Is there any alternative option to delete row from azure storage table for records with specific rowkey?

RemoveEntityByRowKey('123456');
public static void RemoveEntityByRowKey(string myRowKey)
        {
            try
            {
                CloudTable table = _tableClient.GetTableReference("MyAzureTable"); 
                       TableOperation delteOperation = TableOperation.Delete(myRowKey);
                table.Execute(delteOperation);
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                LogError.LogErrorToAzure(ex);
                throw;
            }
        }

Answer

Stopped Contributing picture Stopped Contributing · May 13, 2016

In order to delete an entity, you would need both PartitionKey and RowKey (Delete Entity REST API). So what you would need to do is first fetch the entity with matching RowKey. Once you have fetched this entity, you should be able to call TableOperation.Delete as mentioned in the answers.

However, fetching entity by RowKey is not recommended because it will do a Full Table Scan. It may not be a problem if your table size is small but would be an issue where your table contains large number of entities. Furthermore, a RowKey is unique in a Partition i.e. in a table there can be only one entity with a PartitionKey/RowKey combination. In other words, you can potentially have entities with same RowKey in different Partitions. So when you fetch entities by RowKey only, you may get more than one entity back. You need to ensure that you're deleting correct entity.