One of the things that really irks me about retrieving data from Windows Azure Tables is it’s apparent lack of sortability. Coming from the world of MySQL and RDBMS I am used to being able to manipulate my data in all directions. When you retrieve a set of entities from a Windows Azure Table they are not guaranteed to be in any particular order. Since many applications use timestamps for sorting (comments, news feeds, etc) this is bothersome. Enter Brian Swan, a blogger for PHP at Microsoft. Brian developed a quick function that will sort table results by time stamp. If you are looking to do this yourself I suggest your take a read of his article for a more detailed explanation of what is happening along with example code.

Sorting Windows Azure Table Entities by Timestamp with PHP, by Brian Swan

Happy Hacking!