Docs: batch limit of `azure.storage.blob.ContainerClient.delete_blobs()` is poorly documented

I wanted to move an entire “folder” within a storage account and for unrelated reasons I had to use this python sdk for that. I did this in basically a 3-step action:

1. List all blobs that match this “folder” in the pseudo-hierarchy
2. Copy those blobs individually to the new destination
3. Delete the source blobs, for which I was happy to see that there already was a batched method: azure.storage.blob.ContainerClient.delete_blobs() so I didn’t have to individually delete each blob one by one.

Or so I thought … the batch failed with a PartialBatchErrorException and when I analyzed the parts, I noticed that a request failed with error code ExceedsMaxBatchRequestCount. The thing is: this “max batch request count” was nowhere to be found - neither in the code documentation, nor anywhere on the azure limits documentation page. The only thing I found was this test case from the .NET SDK:

https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-net/blob/402b7b71c310bbe0cb1c49862ba33c19a026f97d/sdk/storage/Azure.Storage.Blobs.Batch/tests/BlobBatchClientTests.cs#L64-L70

The 257 there seemed a bit suspicious so I experimented a bit with chunking and indeed 256 seems to be the maximum number of blobs that can be passed to delete_blobs(). However, 256 as a number is nowhere to be found in the storage section of the python sdk. Why did it have to be so difficult to find anything about this limit?

Once you decide if and where this should be documented, I’d of course offer my help in contributing this documentation.

[Gerrit-K]

Oof … yeah I apparently didn’t check the API docs 😓 And also sorry if I sounded a bit grumpy there. Thank’s for picking this up and responding so quickly, much appreciated! I agree that automatically looping through the batches would be the most ideal solution, but the PR you’ve submitted is already really helpful!

[jalauzon-msft]

Hi @Gerrit-K, thanks for bringing this up and your investigation!

You are correct. The batch size for delete_blobs(), as well as the other batch APIs we support, is limited to 256 by the service. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/storageservices/blob-batch#request-body

I will create a PR to add this limit to the code documentation for all of our batch APIs. Once updated and released, the documentation will also be pushed to our online docs.