this is the general usage pattern at Microsoft. Billing, Logs, Telemetry events are stored in ADX and the state of an individual entity is defined by the arg_max(timestamps)
Spatial DBMS
Search engine

support for complex search expressions docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/parseoperator FTS, Geospatial docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/geo-point-to-geohash-function distributed search -> ADX acts as a distributed search engine
Time Series DBMS

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/time-series-analysis

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	2.58
Rank	#108	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	30.50
Rank	#26	Overall
	#2	Wide column stores

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	3.65
Rank	#85	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Website

www.4d.com

hbase.apache.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

rocksdb.org

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

hbase.apache.org/book.html

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

Developer

4D, Inc

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Powerset

Microsoft

Facebook, Inc.

Initial release

1984

2008

2019

2013

Current release

v20, April 2023

2.3.4, January 2021

cloud service with continuous releases

9.2.1, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

BSD

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

Java

C++

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

Linux
Unix
Windows

using Cygwin

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free, schema definition possible

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

options to bring your own types, AVRO

yes

bool, datetime, dynamic, guid, int, long, real, string, timespan, double: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types

XML support

Some form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
Thrift

Microsoft SQL Server communication protocol (MS-TDS)
RESTful HTTP API

C++ API
Java API

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

C
C#
C++
Groovy
Java
PHP
Python
Scala

.Net
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PowerShell
Python
R

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Coprocessors in Java

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/management/updatepolicy

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Spark connector (open source): github.com/Azure/azure-kusto-spark

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

Single row ACID (across millions of columns)

yes

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

User concepts

Access control

Users and groups

Access Control Lists (ACL) for RBAC, integration with Apache Ranger for RBAC & ABAC

Azure Active Directory Authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

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