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	7.55
Rank	#53	Overall
	#3	Time Series DBMS
	#1	Vector DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	0.06
Rank	#356	Overall
	#35	Time Series DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

kx.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

github.com/sitewhere/sitewhere

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

code.kx.com

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

sitewhere1.sitewhere.io/index.html

Developer

4D, Inc

Kx Systems, a division of First Derivatives plc

Microsoft

SiteWhere

Initial release

1984

2000

kdb was released 2000, kdb+ in 2003

2019

2010

Current release

v20, April 2023

3.6, May 2018

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free 32-bit version

commercial

Open Source

Common Public Attribution License Version 1.0

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

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

predefined scheme

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

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

yes

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

table attribute 'grouped'

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

SQL-like query language (q)

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

HTTP API
JDBC
Jupyter
Kafka
ODBC
WebSocket

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

HTTP REST

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

C
C#
C++
Go
J
Java
JavaScript
Lua
MatLab
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Scala

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

with views

yes

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

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

based on HBase

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Source-replica replication

yes

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

selectable replication factor

based on HBase

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

similar paradigm used for internal processing

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

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

rights management via user accounts

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Integrated columnar database & programming system for streaming, real time and historical...
» more

Competitive advantages

provides seamless scalability; runs on industry standard server platforms; is top-ranked...
» more

Typical application scenarios

tick database streaming sensor data massive intelligence applications oil and gas...
» more

Key customers

Goldman Sachs Morgan Stanley Merrill Lynch J.P. Morgan Deutsche Bank IEX Securities...
» more

Market metrics

kdb+ performance and reliability proven by our customers in critical infrastructure...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

upon request
» more

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.

Related products and services

We invite representatives of vendors of related products to contact us for presenting information about their offerings here.

More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

MySQL, PostgreSQL and Redis are the winners of the March ranking
2 March 2016, Paul Andlinger

show all

Recent citations in the news

Turbocharging the Engine: KX Unleashes AI-First Transformation with kdb+
28 February 2024, Business Wire

KX JOINS SNOWFLAKE PARTNER NETWORK
27 June 2023, PR Newswire

McLaren Applied and KX partner to enhance ATLAS software analytics capabilities
9 August 2023, Professional Motorsport World

Introducing Amazon FinSpace with Managed kdb Insights, a fully managed analytics engine, commonly used by capital ...
18 May 2023, AWS Blog

KX Brings the Power and Performance of Kdb+ to Python Developers With PyKX
8 June 2023, AiThority

provided by Google News

Introducing Microsoft Fabric: The data platform for the era of AI | Microsoft Azure Blog
23 May 2023, azure.microsoft.com

Azure Data Explorer: Log and telemetry analytics benchmark
16 August 2022, azure.microsoft.com

Providing modern data transfer and storage service at Microsoft with Microsoft Azure - Inside Track Blog
13 July 2023, Microsoft

Azure Data Explorer and Stream Analytics for anomaly detection
16 January 2020, azure.microsoft.com

Controlling costs in Azure Data Explorer using down-sampling and aggregation
11 February 2019, azure.microsoft.com

provided by Google News

11 Best Open source IoT Platforms To Develop Smart Projects
9 March 2023, H2S Media

provided by Google News

Share this page