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	30.50
Rank	#26	Overall
	#2	Wide column stores

Score	0.19
Rank	#323	Overall
	#2	Event Stores
	#28	Time Series DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	8.42
Rank	#47	Overall
	#2	Time Series DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/redshift

hbase.apache.org

www.ibm.com/products/db2-event-store

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

prometheus.io

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift

hbase.apache.org/book.html

www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2-event-store

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

prometheus.io/docs

Developer

Amazon (based on PostgreSQL)

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Powerset

IBM

Microsoft

Initial release

2012

2008

2017

2019

2015

Current release

2.3.4, January 2021

2.0

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

free developer edition available

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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

C and C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
Unix
Windows

using Cygwin

Linux

Linux, macOS, Windows for the developer addition

hosted

Linux
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free, schema definition possible

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

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

Numeric data only

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

Import of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

restricted

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

does not fully support an SQL-standard

yes

through the embedded Spark runtime

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
Thrift

ADO.NET
DB2 Connect
JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

C
C#
C++
Groovy
Java
PHP
Python
Scala

C
C#
C++
Cobol
Delphi
Fortran
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Visual Basic

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

.Net
C++
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in Python

yes

Coprocessors in Java

yes

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

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Active-active shard replication

yes

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

yes

by Federation

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

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

none

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

informational only, not enforced by the system

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Single row ACID (across millions of columns)

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

No - written data is immutable

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Yes - Synchronous writes to local disk combined with replication and asynchronous writes in parquet format to permanent shared storage

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

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Azure Active Directory Authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

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