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	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	3.65
Rank	#85	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	0.04
Rank	#360	Overall
	#52	Key-value stores

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

rocksdb.org

www.snowflake.com

github.com/STSSoft/STSdb4

Technical documentation

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

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Microsoft

Facebook, Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

STS Soft SC

Initial release

2019

2013

2014

2011

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

9.2.1, May 2024

4.0.8, September 2015

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

BSD

commercial

Open Source

GPLv2, commercial license available

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

Linux

hosted

Windows

Data scheme

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

schema-free

yes

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

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

primitive types and user defined types (classes)

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

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

C++ API
Java API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

.NET Client API

Supported programming languages

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

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

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

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

horizontal partitioning

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.

yes

none

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

yes

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

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

More information provided by the system vendor

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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.