Query limits in Azure Table storage API

As you probably know Table API used by Azure table storage is limited by the following operators which can be used in queries:

• =
• <>
• >
• <
• <=
• >=

We needed to run analogue of NOT IN Sql operator against RowKey column:

RowKey NOT IN (id1, id2, …, id_n)

where these ids were guids represented by strings. In order to do that with mentioned operators we needed to use not equal operator (<>) and construct query like that:

RowKey <> id1 AND RowKey <> id2 AND … RowKey <> id_n

The problem is that this list of guids didn’t have fixed size and could be potentially big. So it was interesting is there limit for max query length and if yes – what is exact value of this maximum query length.

For testing I created test app and generated conditions over guids like that (in addition to mentioned conditions on RowKey we needed to get groups from particular partition only – so this extra condition was added there as well. Exact partition name is not important – we only need to know that its length was 8 symbols – it will be used for overall query length calculation below):

var tableClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudTableClient(new TableClientConfiguration());

var table = tableClient.GetTableReference("MyTable");
var queryConditions = new List();
queryConditions.Add(TableQuery.GenerateFilterCondition("PartitionKey", QueryComparisons.Equal, "Test1234"));
int numOfConditions = 50;
for (int i = 0; i < numOfConditions; i++)
{
 queryConditions.Add(TableQuery.GenerateFilterCondition("RowKey", QueryComparisons.NotEqual, Guid.NewGuid().ToString().ToLower()));
}
string filter = CombineUsingAnd(queryConditions);
var query = new TableQuery().Where(filter);

var watch = System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch.StartNew();
var result = table.ExecuteQuery(query).ToList();
watch.Stop();


public static string CombineUsingAnd(List queryConditions)
{
 if (queryConditions == null || queryConditions.Count == 0)
 {
  return string.Empty;
 }
 string filter = string.Empty;
 foreach (string queryCondition in queryConditions)
 {
  if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(queryCondition))
  {
   continue;
  }

  if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(filter))
  {
   filter = queryCondition;
  }
  else
  {
   filter = TableQuery.CombineFilters(filter, TableOperators.And, queryCondition);
  }
 }

 return filter;
}

E.g. here how query looks like with condition on 50 guids:

((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((PartitionKey eq 'Teamwork') and (RowKey ne '60712ffe-061b-4a46-8402-01381177c4da')) and (RowKey ne '85694313-2776-485c-833d-ae78c185adba')) and (RowKey ne 'dac6f7fd-1198-486c-b3ea-e90337ee9711')) and (RowKey ne '5faf85cb-4662-4843-87f6-ac6dc20b04e1')) and (RowKey ne '8f524940-9822-46e1-b961-59a2e8fa51b4')) and (RowKey ne 'bacd765e-64d3-464a-a57e-bb30eeca0c2f')) and (RowKey ne '75ba6126-f529-4b30-ae41-882f2b223bff')) and (RowKey ne '5e9950ac-e611-4d58-8c91-8fcf16f2886a')) and (RowKey ne '8f08bd7b-7d6e-4c21-8b94-d5ca2a15f849')) and (RowKey ne 'a965f6f6-f03c-4b4a-91be-98481a35ba11')) and (RowKey ne '5858de75-addb-4f5a-acc1-6f9f55078b4f')) and (RowKey ne '9ada1d04-dd03-4b1f-ae26-bc51b7f35ec3')) and (RowKey ne 'cbb976e7-87c9-4b83-8007-355f3ce1061d')) and (RowKey ne '59e06da8-f343-4a98-9382-0bbf1ce21d3f')) and (RowKey ne 'ea0763d9-cb64-4750-a7e0-c1869ca82a15')) and (RowKey ne '926106f9-bf64-42db-b27f-be9bcb45907e')) and (RowKey ne '3cdcaf1e-ff36-4243-b865-9424e1f46427')) and (RowKey ne '8fcfc4ca-7510-4fa6-95d7-3ff2999de509')) and (RowKey ne '21b04d3a-32e0-4a59-900a-30babfa8fbd2')) and (RowKey ne 'df181ee8-4dc0-4232-b2bc-7e13dc8f2abf')) and (RowKey ne '6a0038d0-40a4-4a11-b626-9850b8178caa')) and (RowKey ne 'ffb78a96-85c9-4648-aba7-3baa56be6c1f')) and (RowKey ne '0c56afd8-164e-4574-9054-8824e6fc1969')) and (RowKey ne '51d95602-cfee-40bf-b9e3-b0f935083742')) and (RowKey ne 'f286d1fb-b9bb-4850-a911-58a77ffc7991')) and (RowKey ne '50280089-e61b-4874-8f99-8dc437f74181')) and (RowKey ne '05f72847-3936-4efc-9902-540a9d9c5ca8')) and (RowKey ne '066fcbe4-afee-46ff-b6d2-18e072f850a0')) and (RowKey ne '602f7cd4-7697-49ca-af51-e96c70eefed5')) and (RowKey ne '6858f832-a58e-4bcb-b57b-7c40d32cbcb6')) and (RowKey ne 'f9e2cc4f-a579-46f4-820b-e7d8ab9711c8')) and (RowKey ne 'cbb68c38-7e73-463b-8839-bef040803c37')) and (RowKey ne '1bf0d7ff-ece6-4ef1-9d48-ae424feea108')) and (RowKey ne 'de1dbdbf-8a75-40b4-bb9b-81e95ff4a542')) and (RowKey ne '31f5c94e-3eea-4c5a-8e60-8899eddc7829')) and (RowKey ne '94bc24a8-28e4-4b6d-965e-9360104bff21')) and (RowKey ne '93d7f84e-eb4b-4c7d-826b-196e8b46255e')) and (RowKey ne 'bd0d0989-7256-4ffc-8904-6135955b8aae')) and (RowKey ne '9c38865a-913c-468c-bd26-25e606f9b73a')) and (RowKey ne 'c2f9b899-76c1-4b04-aa68-fb3f903d81d4')) and (RowKey ne '9b478051-78b2-4a67-a25f-6cc09251ec33')) and (RowKey ne '908f80ea-e31f-4a85-9ff8-8cb80b601434')) and (RowKey ne '7775f8d4-2b9c-4903-a191-b54d214e380a')) and (RowKey ne '55b24a87-3259-4ca4-8869-f6d68f9c95c3')) and (RowKey ne '0476263d-cf8a-49b3-89f1-0bc8df9fd906')) and (RowKey ne 'f7a45c30-eba7-4944-b08b-a875d4b871e0')) and (RowKey ne '4136dc3c-10d3-4d58-afb9-23d8b422822e')) and (RowKey ne 'b6a40f8e-5284-4cbd-9356-2296df415650')) and (RowKey ne 'd63ecb62-5f48-4314-8a15-08c0b62ee835')) and (RowKey ne 'e3acdc4f-70a5-4a73-b023-1845ccf9ea51')

Testing results are summarized in the following table:

Num of conditions	Filter length	Query elpsed time
50	2876	12075
100	5726	10550
112	6410	10361
113	6467	10967
114	6524	Bad request
> 114		Bad request

So Table storage query maximum length is between 6467 and 6524 symbols. For us this knowledge was enough to proceed. Hope that this information will help someone.