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

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Time Series DBMS

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

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	1.72
Rank	#145	Overall
	#67	Relational DBMS

Score	0.01
Rank	#376	Overall
	#13	Wide column stores

Score	0.11
Rank	#341	Overall
	#150	Relational DBMS

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

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

www.monetdb.org

github.com/kashirin-alex/swc-db
www.swcdb.org

www.transaction.de/en/products/transbase.html

Technical documentation

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

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

www.monetdb.org/Documentation

www.transaction.de/en/products/transbase/features.html

Developer

Microsoft

MonetDB BV

Alex Kashirin

Transaction Software GmbH

Initial release

2019

1989

2004

2020

1987

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

Dec2023 (11.49), December 2023

0.5, April 2021

Transbase 8.3, 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Mozilla Public License 2.0

Open Source

GPL V3

commercial

free development license

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

C++

C and C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

schema-free

yes

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

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

SQL 2003 with some extensions

SQL-like query language

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

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

JDBC
native C library

MAPI library (MonetDB application programming interface)
ODBC

Proprietary protocol
Thrift

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

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

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

C
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby

C++

C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Kotlin
Objective-C
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

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

yes, in SQL, C, R

yes

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

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

Sharding via remote tables

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

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

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

none

Source-replica replication available in experimental status

Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

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

yes

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

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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