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	17.94
Rank	#34	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	1.47
Rank	#154	Overall
	#26	Key-value stores
	#72	Relational DBMS

Score	0.09
Rank	#346	Overall
	#152	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/redshift

www.firebirdsql.org

www.gridgain.com

linter.ru

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

www.gridgain.com/docs/index.html

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

Developer

Amazon (based on PostgreSQL)

Firebird Foundation

GridGain Systems, Inc.

relex.ru

Microsoft

Initial release

2012

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2007

1990

2019

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

GridGain 8.5.1

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public 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

C and C++

Java, C++, .Net

C and C++

Server operating systems

hosted

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

AIX
Android
BSD
HP Open VMS
iOS
Linux
OS X
VxWorks
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

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

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

does not fully support an SQL-standard

yes

ANSI-99 for query and DML statements, subset of DDL

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

HDFS API
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

ADO.NET
JDBC
LINQ
ODBC
OLE DB
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

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

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
C++
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Qt
Ruby
Tcl

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in Python

PSQL

yes (compute grid and cache interceptors can be used instead)

yes

proprietary syntax with the possibility to convert from PL/SQL

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

yes (cache interceptors and 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

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Source-replica replication

yes (replicated cache)

Source-replica replication

yes

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

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes (compute grid and hadoop accelerator)

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

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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Security Hooks for custom implementations

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Azure Active Directory Authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

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