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	3.28
Rank	#83	Overall
	#45	Relational DBMS

Score	0.87
Rank	#201	Overall
	#94	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#385	Overall
	#7	Native XML DBMS
	#24	Search engines

Score	133.72
Rank	#7	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.3ds.com/nuodb-distributed-sql-database

www.searchxml.net/category/products

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

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

doc.nuodb.com

www.searchxml.net/support/handouts

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Microsoft

Dassault Systèmes

originally NuoDB, Inc.

informationpartners gmbh

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2019

2013

2015

2014

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

1.0

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

limited 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

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, SoftLayer
Linux
OS X
Windows

Windows

hosted

Data scheme

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

schema-free

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

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

APIs and other access methods

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API
WebDAV
XQuery
XSLT

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

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

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

C++

most other programming languages supported via APIs

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Java, SQL

yes

on the application server

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

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

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

data is dynamically stored/cached on the nodes where it is read/written

none

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.

yes

Managed transparently by NuoDB

yes

sychronisation to multiple collections

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

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

tunable commit protocol

multiple readers, single writer

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC

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

Temporary table

User concepts

Access control

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Standard SQL roles/ privileges, Administrative Users

Domain, group and role-based access control at the document level and for application services

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

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