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Create a table in Azure Data Storage

This is part of my blog series Creating an App in Azure.

The next step is to create a table in Azure Data Storage. I will make additional blog entries using other data sources, but a table is the easiest thing to relate to, so we use it for our first example.

From your browser, sign into your Azure tenant: https://portal.azure.com.
Enter "Storage Accounts" in the global search bar and click "Storage Accounts".
From the Storage Center page, if you not already have a Storage Account to use:
- From the Ribbon, click Create.
- From the Basics tab, select your Subscription and your Resource Group. In our example, "rg-youtube".
- Enter the name. Storage Accounts must be unique. Our naming convention is the sa prefix, so our example is "sa-youtube".
- Choose a Region, preferably one close to where you live.
- For Preferred storage type, chose "Azure Blob Storage or Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2". You will use this same Storage Account for other types of storage, this is the best overall choice performance-wise.
- Leave Performance as Standard and choose LRS for Redundancy. These are the cheapest options especially for sandbox efforts.
- Click "Review + create" and then "Create". You can explore the other options another time.
Click the title of your Storage Account (unless you just created one, then you are already on the right page).
From the Storage Account page, expand "Data storage". You will see there are Containers (blob storage), File shares (like a shared folder or One Drive), Queues (for storing messages sent between resources in Azure), and Tables (like an Access table or an Excel workbook). Click "Tables".
From the Tables page, you will see your existing tables (if any). From the Ribbon, click "Table".
From the Add table dialog window, enter your Table name. In our example, "Tasks".
Click "OK".
Your table has been created. There is no schema with Azure Tables, so there are no fields defined. If you added a row with "Title" and "Date", and then added a row with "Title" and "Project", you would see three fields, "Title", "Date", and "Project". There are no required fields, and none of the rows have to have data in the same fields as other rows. This allows a great deal of flexibility, but you should still have a schema in mind when laying out your data.

Friday, September 12, 2025 12:35 PM