title: Azure Table Complex Data Best Practices
body: <p>I'm working on a research project that needs to store complex data as entities in an Azure Table. The entities for the table are cells that contains many geometric points and lines, with references to parents and so on. </p>
  
  <p>Unless I am mistaken, an entity can only contain simple types (string, int, bool, etc) but nothing like List. I'm working around this in the meantime by just serializing the entire structure and converting that to a base64 string and having the entity consist of just this string, as well as some other flags.</p>
  
  <p>Now that is a ludicrous approach in the long run, but that hack will have to do for now until a more responsible/appropriate method is deployed.</p>
  
  <p>What would the best practices be for complex data types and Azure? Write many blobs out and keep track of them with a table?</p>