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Vertical portioning is like splitting up a table by columns: one set of columns goes into one data store, and another set of columns goes into a different data store.

When you represent this data as a table and look at the different varieties of data, you can see that the three columns on the left have string data that can be efficiently stored by a relational database, whereas the two columns on the right are essentially byte arrays that come from image files. It's possible to storage image-file data in a relational database, and a lot of people do that because they don’t want to save the data to the file system. They might not have a file system capable of storing the required volumes of data, or they might not want to manage a separate backup and restore system. This approach works well for on-premises databases and for small amounts of data in cloud databases. In the on-premises environment, it might be easier to just let the database administrator (DBA) take care of everything.

But in a cloud database, storage is relatively expensive, and a high volume of images could make the size of the database grow beyond the limits at which it can operate efficiently. You can address these problems by partitioning the data vertically, which means you choose the most appropriate data store for each column in your table of data. What might work best for this example is to put the string data in a relational database and the images in Blob storage.

Storing images in Blob storage instead of in a database is more practical in the cloud than in an on- premises environment because you don’t have to worry about setting up file servers or managing backup and restore of data stored outside the relational database: all that is handled for you by the Blob storage service.

Without this partitioning scheme, and assuming an average image size of 3 megabytes (MB), the Fix It app would be able to store only about 40,000 tasks before it hit the maximum database size of 150 gigabytes. After removing the images, the database can store 10 times as many tasks; the application can handle a much larger number of people before you have to think about implementing a horizontal partitioning scheme. And as the app scales, your expenses grow more slowly because the bulk of your storage needs are going into very inexpensive Blob storage.

Source of Information : Building Cloud Apps With Microsoft Azure