Following on from a previous article looking into what is good practice for defining PartitionKey and RowKey for Azure Table storage, here we take a real life scenario and look at some of the possible values we could use for when storing a blog post.

🎯 Your main query patterns will likely be:

• Get a single post by slug or ID
• List posts by publish date
• List posts by category or tag
• List posts by author
• Show the latest N posts

Azure Tables don’t support secondary indexes, so you design your keys around these patterns.

---

✔️ Recommended Primary Table: Posts

PartitionKey: yyyy-MM (publish month)

RowKey: slug or inverted timestamp

This gives you:

• Fast “latest posts” queries
• Natural grouping by month
• Even distribution (no hotspots)
• Easy retrieval of a single post

Example

PartitionKey	RowKey	Title
2025-02	my-first-post	My First Post
2025-02	MaxTicks-638742...	Another Post
2025-03	building-a-cms	Building a CMS

Why this works

• Blog posts are naturally time‑series data.
• Monthly partitions keep partitions from getting too large.
• You can fetch the latest posts by querying the most recent partitions.

---

✔️ Alternative RowKey Options

Option A: Slug (human‑friendly)

• Easy to retrieve a post directly
• Great for SEO‑style URLs
• Good if slugs are unique

Option B: Inverted timestamp (machine‑friendly)

• Perfect for “latest first” queries
• RowKey sorts newest → oldest
• Format:
  RowKey = (DateTime.MaxValue - PublishDate).Ticks.ToString("d19")

---

✔️ Handling Categories, Tags, and Authors

Azure Tables don’t support secondary indexes, so you create additional tables for fast lookups.

Table: PostsByCategory

• PartitionKey: category
• RowKey: yyyy-MM-dd-HH-mm-ss + slug
• Value: pointer to the main post (PartitionKey + RowKey)

Table: PostsByTag

Same pattern as categories.

Table: PostsByAuthor

Same pattern again.

These tables act like manual indexes—super cheap, super fast.

---

✔️ Summary of the Best Practice

Table	PartitionKey	RowKey	Purpose
Posts	yyyy-MM	slug or inverted timestamp	Main storage
PostsByCategory	category	timestamp+slug	Fast category queries
PostsByTag	tag	timestamp+slug	Fast tag queries
PostsByAuthor	authorId	timestamp+slug	Fast author queries

This structure scales beautifully and keeps queries predictable and cheap.