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

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	12.45
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	0.67
Rank	#233	Overall
	#20	Time Series DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	821.56
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	1.02
Rank	#190	Overall
	#33	Document stores
	#18	Graph DBMS

Website

impala.apache.org

github.com/kairosdb/kairosdb

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

surrealdb.com

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

kairosdb.github.io

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

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

surrealdb.com/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Microsoft

SurrealDB Ltd

Initial release

2013

2019

1989

2022

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

1.2.2, November 2018

cloud service with continuous releases

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

v1.5.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

Java

C++

Rust

Server operating systems

Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

schema-free

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

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

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

Graphite protocol
HTTP REST
Telnet API

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

GraphQL
RESTful HTTP API
WebSocket

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

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

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

Deno
Go
JavaScript (Node.js)
Rust

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

Triggers

yes

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

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

based on Cassandra

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

based on Cassandra

yes

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

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

based on Cassandra
Immediate Consistency

based on Cassandra

Eventual Consistency
Immediate 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

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

simple password-based access control

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes, based on authentication and database rules

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