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	16.88
Rank	#35	Overall
	#22	Relational DBMS

Score	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	0.29
Rank	#302	Overall
	#21	Search engines

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/redshift

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

manticoresearch.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

manual.manticoresearch.com

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

Developer

Amazon (based on PostgreSQL)

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Manticore Software

Microsoft

Initial release

2012

2010

2017

2019

Current release

6.0, February 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2

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

Erlang

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Fixed schema

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Int, Bigint, Float, Timestamp, Bit, Int array, Bigint array, JSON, Boolean

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.

Can index from XML

yes

Secondary indexes

restricted

yes

full-text index on all search fields

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

does not fully support an SQL-standard

SQL-like query language

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Binary API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API
RESTful HTTP/SQL API
SQL over MySQL

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

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

Elixir
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in Python

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

user defined functions

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

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Synchronous replication based on Galera library

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

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

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

atomic operations within a document possible

yes

isolated transactions for atomic changes and binary logging for safe writes

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Manticore index.

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 rights for users can be defined per database

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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