Does the Azure table storage API cache results?

Question

When I run the same query multiple times against the Azure table storage, is it using caching and speeding up the subsequent queries?

In other words, is it caching the HTTP response?

Answer 1

Azure storage definitly use caching: http://www.scribd.com/doc/73458371/Windows-Azure-Storage-at-23rd-ACM-Symposium-on-Operating-Systems-Principles-SOSP-Paper

Note that writes are actually kept in memory until correctly replicated and I think it's safe to assume that any reads are cached too so that multiple reads to the same data are served from memory.

Answer 2

While I am obviously not privy to the internals:

Azure Storage will issue HTTP 304 based on the ETag headers when you send requests that act upon or return a single entity. Depending on your school of though, that can been seen as formal caching. Outside of that, Azure promotes instant (or more correctly "Optimistic") concurrency, so more aggressive caching would not be prudent. (Cache validation,etc overhead would make optimistic concurrency near impossible).

Outside of the ETag/HTTP exchange, I would assume the intent to be that the developer implement more aggressive caching in the client(s) that are consuming the data/