Azure Data Explorer is a fully-managed big data analytics cloud platform and data-exploration service, developed by Microsoft, that ingests structured, semi-structured (like JSON) and unstructured data (like free-text). The service then stores this data and answers analytic ad hoc queries on it with seconds of latency. It is a full text indexing and retrieval database, including time series analysis capabilities and regular expression evaluation and text parsing. It is offered as Platform as a Service (PaaS) as part of Microsoft Azure platform. The product was announced by Microsoft in 2018.