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	5.59
Rank	#63	Overall
	#7	Search engines

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	0.14
Rank	#332	Overall
	#29	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.06
Rank	#356	Overall
	#35	Time Series DBMS

Website

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

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

quasar.ai

github.com/sitewhere/sitewhere

Technical documentation

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search

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

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

doc.quasar.ai/master

sitewhere1.sitewhere.io/index.html

Developer

Microsoft

quasardb

SiteWhere

Initial release

2015

2019

1989

2009

2010

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

3.14.1, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

commercial

Free community edition, Non-profit organizations and non-commercial usage are eligible for free licenses

Open Source

Common Public Attribution License Version 1.0

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.

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Implementation language

C++

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
Windows

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

schema-free

predefined scheme

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

integer and binary

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

with tags

SQL

Support of SQL

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

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

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

HTTP API

HTTP REST

Supported programming languages

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

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

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

.Net
C
C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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

Sharding

consistent hashing

Sharding

based on HBase

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

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

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Source-replica replication with selectable replication factor

selectable replication factor

based on HBase

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

with Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

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

by using LevelDB

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Transient mode

User concepts

Access control

yes

using Azure authentication

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Cryptographically strong user authentication and audit trail

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

More information provided by the system vendor

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