Brian Swan has a new post on his MSDN blog today looking at a different way to consume the data from Windows Azure instead of the normal interface - consuming it as OData.

Did you know that data stored in Windows Azure Table storage can be accessed through an OData feed? Does that question even make sense to you? If you answered no to either of those questions and you are interested in learning more, then read on. In this post I’ll show you how to use the OData SDK for PHP to retrieve, insert, update, and delete data stored in Windows Azure Table storage.

He shows how to create a class that matches the table structure (complete with hints in the comments) and is used along with the service account/key information to create a table, insert an entity, remove them, updating an entity, deleting it and, finally, deleting the table.