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	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#41	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.14
Rank	#332	Overall
	#29	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.45
Rank	#261	Overall
	#41	Document stores
	#122	Relational DBMS

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

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

opennms.github.io/newts

quasar.ai

www.sequoiadb.com

Technical documentation

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

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

github.com/OpenNMS/newts/wiki

doc.quasar.ai/master

www.sequoiadb.com/en/index.php?m=Files&a=index

Developer

Microsoft

OpenNMS Group

quasardb

Sequoiadb Ltd.

Initial release

2019

1989

2014

2009

2013

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

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

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

Open Source

Server: AGPL; Client: Apache V2

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

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

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

integer and binary

yes

oid, date, timestamp, binary, regex

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

with tags

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

SQL-like query language

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)

HTTP REST
Java API

HTTP API

proprietary protocol using JSON

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

Java

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

.Net
C++
Java
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

JavaScript

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

based on Cassandra

Sharding

consistent hashing

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

selectable replication factor

based on Cassandra

Source-replica replication with selectable replication factor

Source-replica replication

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

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

based on Cassandra
Immediate Consistency

based on Cassandra

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Document is locked during a transaction

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

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Cryptographically strong user authentication and audit trail

simple password-based access control

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.