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
Search engine

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

Score	2.02
Rank	#124	Overall
	#22	Document stores
	#59	Relational DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	0.82
Rank	#212	Overall
	#36	Document stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

drill.apache.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

rockset.com

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

drill.apache.org/docs

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

docs.rockset.com

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Microsoft

Rockset

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2012

2019

2014

Current release

1.20.3, January 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 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

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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

dynamic typing

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

ingestion from XML files supported

yes

Secondary indexes

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL SELECT statement is SQL:2003 compliant

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

Read-only SQL queries, including JOINs

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

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

HTTP REST

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C++

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

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

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Automatic sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

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

yes

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

none

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Eventual 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

Depending on the underlying data source

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

Depending on the underlying data source

User concepts

Access control

Depending on the underlying data source

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Access rights for users and organizations can be defined via Rockset console

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

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.