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	12.45
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	0.27
Rank	#309	Overall
	#2	Event Stores
	#28	Time Series DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Website

impala.apache.org

cassandra.apache.org

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

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

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

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

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

IBM

Microsoft

Initial release

2013

2008

2017

2019

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

4.1.3, July 2023

2.0

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

free developer edition available

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.

Astra DB: Multi-cloud DBaaS built on Apache Cassandra.

Implementation language

C++

Java

C and C++

Server operating systems

Linux

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

Linux, macOS, Windows for the developer addition

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

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

yes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

SQL-like SELECT, DML and DDL statements (CQL)

yes

through the embedded Spark runtime

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

CQL (Cassandra Query Language, an SQL-like language)
Thrift

ADO.NET
DB2 Connect
JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

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

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

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

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Active-active shard 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

query execution via MapReduce

yes

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Eventual Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

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

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

Access rights for users can be defined per object

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Azure Active Directory Authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
» more

Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
» more

Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
» more

Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
» more

News

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11 June 2024

Introducing Tejas Kumar, Developer Relations Engineer
7 June 2024

Indexing All of Wikipedia on a Laptop
5 June 2024

An Introduction to Phil Nash, Developer Relations
3 June 2024

Focus on Creativity, Not Clusters: DataStax Mission Control in Action!
30 May 2024

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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.