Enabling Microsoft* Azure* on the Intel® Edison Board

This article explains how to establish a connection with Microsoft Azure cloud services using nodeJS* API. While this was written for the Intel® Edison board, it should work on any platform that runs nodeJS. This includes creating a storage account, store and retrieve data.

Create an Azure storage account

Log in to Azure Management Portal and click New at the bottom of the page.

Select DATA SERVICES -> STORAGE -> QUICK CREATE and type a name to use in the URI for the storage account. Make sure that a green tick mark is enabled indicating a unique name.

Click CREATE STORAGE ACCOUNT.

Set up your development environment

Install azure-storage npm module into your project

npm install azure-table-node

This article uses a third party node module azure-table-node for convenience. You can use the official azure client library for node.

Setup an Azure storage connection

Create a node reference variable for the module.

var azureTable = require('azure-table-node');

The function setDefaultClient requires storage name and access key which can be obtained from Azure portal.

  azureTable.setDefaultClient({
    accountUrl: 'https://' + this.accountName + '.table.core.windows.net/',
    accountName: this.accountName,
    accountKey: this.config.accessKey,
    timeout: 10000
  });

Create table

Get the default client created above. Use this client to perform operations on Azure storage.

var defaultClient = azureTable.getDefaultClient();

Create a table with a name using the client.

// use the client to create the table
defaultClient.createTable('tableName', cb);

Store Data

Azure table storage takes data as entities. Each entity will have a Row and Partition Key. A Row Key must be unique to every row.

entity['PartitionKey'] = entity.sensor_id.toString();
entity['RowKey'] = Date.parse(entity.timestamp).toString();
entity['value'] = 86;
client.insertOrReplaceEntity(‘tableNmae’, entity, function(err, data) {
  // err is null
  // data contains etag
});

Query Data

Timestamp based query

dataQuery = azureTable.Query.create('PartitionKey', '==', readQuery.sensor_id).and('timestamp', '>=', readQuery.timestamp);

Sensorid based query

dataQuery = azureTable.Query.create('PartitionKey', '==', readQuery.sensor_id);

Call queryEntities on the client with options to return only required fields viz., sensor_id, timestamp, and value.

client.queryEntities(‘tableName’, {
    query: dataQuery,
    onlyFields: ['sensor_id', 'timestamp', 'value']
  }, function(err, results, continuation) {});

References

Microsoft documentation - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/develop/nodejs/

Azure node project - https://www.npmjs.com/package/azure

Azure Table Storage client - https://www.npmjs.com/package/azure-table-node

Azure - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn578280.aspx

Azure Storage Explorer - https://azurestorageexplorer.codeplex.com/