Handling Blobs

  • Article

[This document supports a preliminary release of a software product that may be changed substantially prior to final commercial release. This document is provided for informational purposes only.]

Blob support in Microsoft® SQL Data Services (SDS) allows you to store videos, photographs, or virtually any other kind of file or binary data. Each blob has a unique URI that can be used to access it. This enables interesting scenarios such as photo libraries, document stores and so on.

Blobs are entities similar to other Flexible Entities (Authorities, Containers and Entities) in SDS. Each blob entity has Id, Version and Kind metadata properties like all other entities. In addition, each blob entity also has an additional property, Content, with following attributes

  • content-disposition
  • content-type
  • content-length

During blob creation:

  • You specify the entity's Id.
  • The Content attributes are provided along with the binary payload.
  • The Kind property for all blob entities is "Entity" and cannot be changed at this time.

Flexible properties on blobs are not supported in this release.

You can retrieve a blob's content through a GET request. A query against a container returns only the blob metadata. Queries cannot be used to retrieve blob content.

At this time the service supports only the REST interface when handling blobs. The SOAP interface is not supported. Blobs are limited to 100 MB in this release.

Following sub topics provide additional information:

Examples of Handling Blobs using REST

Examples of Handling Blobs using SOAP

See Also

Concepts

SDS Data Model Overview (Authorities, Containers, Entities and Flexible Entities)