What Is a BLOB?
BLOB, Blob Storage, Azure BLOB storage, BLOB actions, Azure Blob Storage Features
A Binary Large OBject (BLOB) is a collection of binary data stored as a single entity in a DataBase Management System (DBMS).
Since blobs can store binary data, they can be used to store images or other multimedia files. Hence, blobs are typically images, audio, or other multimedia objects, though sometimes binary executable code is stored as a blob.
It is used for storing information in databases and database support for blobs is not universal. They often require significantly more space than other data types is a reason that blobs are used to store objects such as images, audio files, and video clips. The amount of data a blob can store varies depending on the database type, but some databases allow blob sizes of several gigabytes.
Blob Storage
Objects in Blob storage can be accessed from anywhere in the world via HTTP or HTTPS.
Blob storage is ideal for:
- Serving images or documents directly to a browser.
- Storing files for distributed access.
- Streaming video and audio.
- Storing data for backup and restore, disaster recovery, and archiving.
- Storing data for analysis by an on-premises or Azure-hosted service.
Blob storage supports the most popular development frameworks ( viz. Java, .NET, Python, and Node.js) and is the only cloud storage service that offers a premium, SSD-based object storage tier for low-latency and interactive scenarios.
Blob storage meets the demanding, high-throughput requirements of HPC applications while providing the scale necessary to support storage for billions of data points flowing in from IoT endpoints.
Blob storage is built from the ground up to support the scale, security, and availability needs of mobile, web, and cloud-native application developers which can be used as a cornerstone for serverless architectures such as Azure Functions.
Azure Blob Storage
Azure Blob storage is Microsoft’s object storage solution for the cloud. Blob storage is optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data.
Users or client applications can access blobs via URLs, the Azure Storage REST API, Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI, or an Azure Storage client library. The storage client libraries are available for multiple languages, including .NET, Java, Node.js, Python, PHP, and Ruby.
Azure Blob Storage helps you create data lakes for your analytics needs and provides storage to build powerful cloud-native and mobile apps. Optimize costs with tiered storage for your long-term data and flexibly scale up for high-performance computing and machine learning workloads.
Azure Data Lake Storage is a highly scalable and cost-effective data lake solution for big data analytics. It combines the power of a high-performance file system with massive scale and economy to help you speed your time to insight. Data Lake Storage extends Azure Blob Storage capabilities and is optimized for analytics workloads.
Azure Blob Storage Features
- Store and access unstructured data at scale.
- Scalable, durable, and available.
- Secured.
- Optimized for data lakes.
- Comprehensive data management.
- Build powerful cloud-native applications.
Azure Blob Actions
1. Copy blob:
This operation copies a blob. If the blob is being deleted/renamed on the server right after it was copied, the connector may return an HTTP 404 error by its design. Please use a delay for 1 minute before deleting or renaming the newly created blob. Chunk transfer is not supported in this action. If source and destination are present in the same storage account, please use the relative path. Otherwise, the maximum size of a source for copy blob operation is 50 MB.
2. Create blob:
This operation uploads a blob to Azure Blob Storage.
3. Create block blob:
This operation uploads a block blob to Azure Blob Storage.
4. Create SAS URI by path:
This operation creates a SAS link for a blob using the path.
5. Delete blob:
This operation deletes a blob.
6. Extract archive to a folder:
This operation extracts an archived blob into a folder (example: .zip).
7. Get available access policies:
This operation gets available shared access policies for a blob.
8. Get blob content:
This operation retrieves blob contents using id.
9. Get blob content using a path:
This operation retrieves blob contents using a path
10. Get Blob Metadata:
This operation retrieves blob metadata using blob id.
11. Get Blob Metadata using a path:
This operation retrieves blob metadata using path.
12. List blobs:
This operation lists blobs in a container.
13. List blobs in the root folder:
This operation lists blobs in the Azure Blob Storage root folder.
14. Set blob tier by path:
This operation sets a tier for a block blob on a standard storage account using the path.
15. Update blob:
This operation updates a blob in Azure Blob Storage.
