Richard Mitchell has been working with Windows Azure for a few years now there’s a few things he wish he knew when he started out - so he's asking the community to share their knowledge and help Red Gate put together a free eBook of 50 tips for Azure Storage.

If you submit a tip and it’s included in the book, you'll get listed as an author.

So how do you get involved I hear you cry?

Simple – send an email to melanie.townsend@red-gate.com with your tip and we’ll get back to you. She has kindly offered to pull the tips together, so be nice.

Conversely, if you're more comfortable with a form, one has been put together for your use.

What does a tip look like?

Well we’re looking for tips on 5 topics: SQL Azure, Blob storage, Table storage, Queue storage and Diagnostics & Logging.

These tips should be short – only a couple of sentences of text, so for example…

Tip 1: Ensure all tables in SQL Azure have a clustered index

It may be a simple thing but you won’t notice anything isn’t working until you attempt to insert into a table and by then it’s generally too late.

Tip 2: Keep all services in a single data center to keep costs down

In Azure you are charged when data leaves a data center. So in practical terms if you have a load storage, queues, SQL Azure and compute instances you want to make sure they are all in the same data center.

Tip 3: Think hard before using Azure Table storage to get the most out of it

Azure Table storage is a very neat way of storing more unstructured data although really consider how you’re going to partition your data beforehand. There are no indexes above PartitionKey and RowKey so be sure to optimize your data storage for retrieval. It’s not designed to be just like a database table, it’s very different and powerful in different ways.

How do I get involved again? This looks like a great idea!

Melanie would love to hear your tips so we can take the best and put them in the book, just send an email to melanie.townsend@red-gate.com or fill out the form.