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

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

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	125.90
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	0.29
Rank	#302	Overall
	#21	Search engines

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	0.03
Rank	#392	Overall
	#8	Spatial DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.ibm.com/products/db2

manticoresearch.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.mireo.com/spacetime

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2

manual.manticoresearch.com

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

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

IBM

Manticore Software

Microsoft

Mireo

Initial release

2008

1983

host version

2017

2019

2020

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

12.1, October 2016

6.0, February 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

free version is available

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.

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

Implementation language

Java

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS
Windows

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Fixed schema

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

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

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.

Can index from XML

yes

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

full-text index on all search fields

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

SQL-like query language

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
JSON style queries

MongoDB compatible
ODBC
XQuery

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

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

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
C++
Cobol
Delphi
Fortran
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

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

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

C#
C++
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

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

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

only with Windows/Unix/Linux Version

Sharding

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

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Fixed-grid hypercubes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes

with separate tools (MQ, InfoSphere)

Synchronous replication based on Galera library

yes

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

Real-time block device replication (DRBD)

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

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

yes

isolated transactions for atomic changes and binary logging for safe writes

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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.

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Azure Active Directory Authentication

yes

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

An Introduction to David Jones-Gilardi, Developer Relations
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

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.