Introduction

Modern e-commerce platforms like Amazon handle millions of transactions per day across a global customer base. Traditional relational databases often struggle under this load due to:

1. Multiple table updates per transaction, which adds latency when enforcing ACID constraints.
2. A rigid schema requiring every row to share the same columns, which doesn’t adapt well to a diverse product catalog.

What Is Semi-Structured Data?

Semi-structured data models store each transaction—including customer, order items, and shipping details—in a single record. This approach:

• Requires only one insert per transaction.
• Eliminates foreign-key joins and multi-step ACID enforcement.
• Scales effortlessly to millions of transactions daily.

Each record is self-describing (similar to JSON or XML), allowing fields to vary by record. For example, digital goods can omit shipping address fields.

Benefits of Semi-Structured Storage

• Schema Flexibility: Add or remove fields per record without downtime.
• Single-Row Transactions: Faster inserts, no complex joins.
• High Throughput: Ideal for high-volume, write-heavy workloads.

Trade-offs and Limitations

While semi-structured storage (e.g., Azure Table Storage) improves write performance, it introduces key limitations:

Hybrid Data Architecture

To balance performance and query flexibility, most organizations adopt a hybrid approach:

• NoSQL tables (e.g., Azure Table Storage) for high-volume, schema-flexible transactions.
• Relational databases for shared entities requiring rich querying and indexing (customer profiles, product catalogs).

Example Record

Below is a sample semi-structured transaction stored in Azure Table Storage:

{
  "PartitionKey": "Orders",
  "RowKey": "2023-10-01_0001",
  "order": {
    "customer": {
      "Name": "Peter Vogel",
      "Address": "London, Ontario"
    },
    "product": {
      "Name": "Widget",
      "Price": 15.10
    }
  }
}

Links and References

• Azure Table Storage Documentation
• NoSQL Overview on Microsoft Docs
• Azure Storage pricing<br>