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	2.73
Rank	#108	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	2.65
Rank	#111	Overall
	#55	Relational DBMS

Score	29.85
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	5.16
Rank	#69	Overall
	#37	Relational DBMS

Website

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

maxdb.sap.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

Technical documentation

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

maxdb.sap.com/documentation

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

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

Developer

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

SAP, acquired from Software AG (Adabas-D) in 1997

Microsoft

Initial release

2010

1984

2014

2019

Current release

7.9.10.12, February 2024

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Limited community edition free

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

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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

All properties auto-indexed by default

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
WebDAV

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

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

Supported programming languages

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

.Net
C#
Java
Perl
PHP
Python

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

yes

JavaScript

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

yes

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

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

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.

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per database

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

Azure Active Directory 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.