Differences Between the Storage Emulator and Windows Azure Storage Services

The following general differences apply to storage services:

• The storage emulator supports only a single fixed account and a well-known authentication key. This account and key are the only credentials permitted for use with the emulated storage services. They are:
  
  
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  Account name: devstoreaccount1
  Account key: Eby8vdM02xNOcqFlqUwJPLlmEtlCDXJ1OUzFT50uSRZ6IFsuFq2UVErCz4I6tq/K1SZFPTOtr/KBHBeksoGMGw==
  

  Important
  The authentication key supported by the storage emulator is intended only for testing the functionality of your client authentication code. It does not serve any security purpose. You cannot use your production storage account and key with the storage emulator. You should not use the emulated storage account with production data.

• The storage emulator is not a scalable storage service and will not support a large number of concurrent clients.
  
  
• The URI scheme supported by the storage emulator differs from the URI scheme supported by the cloud storage services. The development URI scheme specifies the account name as part of the hierarchical path of the URI, rather than as part of the domain name. This difference is due to the fact that domain name resolution is available in the cloud but not on the local computer. For more information about URI differences in the development and production environments, see Using storage service URIs in Run a Windows Azure Application with the Storage Emulator.
  
  

The following differences apply to the Blob service:

• The Blob service emulator only supports blob sizes up to 2 GB.
  
  
• A Put Blob operation may succeed against a blob that exists in the storage emulator and has an active lease, even if the lease ID has not been specified as part of the request.
  
  
• The storage emulator does not support Set Blob Service Properties or SetServiceProperties.
  
  

The following differences apply to the Table service:

• Date properties in the Table service in the storage emulator support only the range supported by SQL Server 2005 (For example, they are required to be later than January 1, 1753). All dates before January 1, 1753 are changed to this value. The precision of dates is limited to the precision of SQL Server 2005, meaning that dates are precise to 1/300th of a second.
  
  
• The storage emulator supports partition key and row key property values of less than 900 bytes. The total size of the account name, table name, and key property names together cannot exceed 900 bytes.
  
  
• The total size of a row in a table in the storage emulator is limited to less than 1 MB.
  
  
• In the storage emulator, properties of data type Edm.Guid or Edm.Binary support only the Equal (eq) and NotEqual (ne) comparison operators in query filter strings.
  
  
• The storage emulator does not support Set Table Service Properties or SetServiceProperties.
  
  

The following differences apply to the Queue service:

• The storage emulator does not support Set Queue Service Properties or SetServiceProperties.
  
  

The following differences apply to the Windows Azure drives:

• When mounting a Windows Azure drive from the Windows Azure compute emulator, the drive must be backed by a page blob created in the storage emulator. It is not possible to mount a drive from the compute emulator that is backed by a page blob in Windows Azure. This behavior differs from that of the other Windows Azure storage services, which can be accessed in the cloud from code that is running in the compute emulator.
  
  
• When creating a new Windows Azure drive from the compute emulator, be sure to specify the credentials for the emulated storage account.