[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