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	5.16
Rank	#69	Overall
	#37	Relational DBMS

Score	3.27
Rank	#97	Overall
	#16	Document stores
	#6	Graph DBMS
	#15	Key-value stores

Score	123.20
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	2.05
Rank	#129	Overall
	#11	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

orientdb.org

www.snowflake.com

www.stardog.com

Technical documentation

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

www.orientdb.com/docs/last/index.html

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.stardog.com

Developer

Microsoft

OrientDB LTD; CallidusCloud; SAP

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Stardog-Union

Initial release

2019

2010

2014

2010

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

3.2.29, March 2024

7.3.0, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

60-day fully-featured trial license; 1-year fully-featured non-commercial use license for academics/students

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

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java JDK (>= JDK 6)

hosted

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

schema-free

Schema can be enforced for whole record ("schema-full") or for some fields only ("schema-hybrid")

yes

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

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

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

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

SQL

Support of SQL

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

SQL-like query language, no joins

yes

Yes, compatible with all major SQL variants through dedicated BI/SQL Server

APIs and other access methods

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

Tinkerpop technology stack with Blueprints, Gremlin, Pipes
Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

GraphQL query language
HTTP API
Jena RDF API
OWL
RDF4J API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SNARL
SPARQL
Spring Data
Stardog Studio
TinkerPop 3

Supported programming languages

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

.Net
C
C#
C++
Clojure
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Java, Javascript

user defined functions

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

Triggers

yes

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

Hooks

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

via event handlers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

yes

none

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.

Multi-source replication

yes

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

could be achieved with distributed queries

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency in HA-Cluster

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

relationship in graphs

yes

relationships in graphs

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

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

Access rights for users and roles; record level security configurable

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

Access rights for users and roles

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.