[knutwannheden]

Out if necessity I've started working with Microsoft's Kusto Query Language [1] which is used by various services in Azure (e g. their Log Analytics Workspace).

At first I found the language rather akward and was wondering why yet another query language. But the more I used it the more it grew on me. The thing I really like is that unlike the clauses in SQL, the order of operators isn't really fixed and it reads and feels like a pipe command in a Unix shell.

One example where I find this far superior is when doing aggregations. In SQL I would have to modify both the start and the end of the query, which is quite a nuisance.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/kusto/q...)

[bradford]

(disclaimer: Microsoft Employee, this is my opinion).

I've been using KQL for a long time, it really is a nice language both for querying and maintaining the data.

But, aside from fixing some serious language issues with SQL, I really enjoy the wide range of supported scenarios. You can use KQL to query a SQL database [1], you can use python [2], do all kinds of time-series analysis [3][4], do distinct counts on various fields without too much explicit query-authoring [5].

My main beef with Azure Data Explorer (which, as I understand it, is the engine that handles the query execution) is the price... I wish it was easy for hobbyist developers to launch and try out.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/kusto/q... [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/kusto/q... [3] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/kusto/q... [4] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/kusto/q... [5] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/kusto/q...

[knutwannheden]

There is this page about a free cluster [1]. It appears to be pretty beefy, but it seems like it is for one year only, but IMHO that isn't entirely clear.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/start-f...

[MaKey]

Today Microsoft announced that an emulator for Azure Data Explorer is generally available [1]. It is a Windows docker container.

[1] https://aka.ms/adx.emulator.doc

[kccqzy]

Speaking of custom query languages by Big Tech companies, I've always been curious about Google's Yedalog[0]. I mean it's obviously inspired by a rich history of logic programming here, as it's trying to find a middle ground between Prolog and Datalog. I'm not sure what's come of it, and I certainly hope they eventually make it open source or at least available for BigQuery for something.

[0]: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

[oldmanhorton]

Kusto is used extensively within Microsoft and has been for a long time. I think it's generally really well liked and really productive, and while it tends to be quite quick, it has some similar performance pitfalls as SQL

[antruok]

The query structure does look nice indeed! The usage of the pipe character feels odd but I suppose there are benefits in the end

[knutwannheden]

I had the same initial reaction regarding the pipe character. But once I started thinking of the query as a pipe (like in the terminal) through which the data flows, where stuff like ORDER BY, SELECT, and GROUP BY are just operators, it started making sense.