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
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	3.28
Rank	#83	Overall
	#45	Relational DBMS

Score	1.72
Rank	#135	Overall
	#62	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#385	Overall
	#54	Document stores
	#21	Object oriented DBMS

Score	133.72
Rank	#7	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.monetdb.org

origodb.com

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

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

www.monetdb.org/Documentation

origodb.com/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Microsoft

MonetDB BV

Robert Friberg et al

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2019

2004

2009

under the name LiveDB

2014

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

Dec2023 (11.49), December 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Mozilla Public License 2.0

Open Source

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

Server operating systems

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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

User defined using .NET types and collections

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

can be achieved using .NET

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

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

JDBC
native C library

MAPI library (MonetDB application programming interface)
ODBC

.NET Client API
HTTP API
LINQ

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

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

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

.Net

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

yes, in SQL, C, R

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

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

yes

Domain Events

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding via remote tables

horizontal partitioning

client side managed; servers are not synchronized

yes

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.

none

Source-replica replication available in experimental status

Source-replica replication

yes

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

depending on model

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

Write ahead log

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

Role based authorization

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

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