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

Relational DBMS

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

Score	17.94
Rank	#34	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

Score	1.73
Rank	#142	Overall
	#4	Native XML DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#7	Spatial DBMS

Score	1.31
Rank	#163	Overall
	#74	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/redshift

basex.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.mireo.com/spacetime

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/timesten.html

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift

docs.basex.org

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

docs.oracle.com/database/timesten-18.1

Developer

Amazon (based on PostgreSQL)

BaseX GmbH

Microsoft

Mireo

Oracle, TimesTen Performance Software, HP

originally founded in HP Labs it was acquired by Oracle in 2005

Initial release

2012

2007

2019

2020

1998

Current release

10.7, August 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

11 Release 2 (11.2.2.8.0)

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

BSD license

commercial

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

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris SPARC/x86
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

XQuery supports types

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

restricted

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

does not fully support an SQL-standard

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
RESTXQ
WebDAV
XML:DB
XQJ

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

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

Actionscript
C
C#
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lisp
Perl
PHP
Python
Qt
Rebol
Ruby
Scala
Visual Basic

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

C#
C++
Python

C
C++
Java
PL/SQL

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in Python

yes

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

PL/SQL

Triggers

yes

via events

yes

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

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Fixed-grid hypercubes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

none

yes

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

Real-time block device replication (DRBD)

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

informational only, not enforced by the system

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

multiple readers, single writer

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by means of logfiles and checkpoints

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept on 4 levels

Azure Active Directory Authentication

yes

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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