There are many significant differences in capabilities, and design approaches between other systems and Cosmos DB. At a very high level. differences are at two levels - the design of the database engine and the larger distributed system. The database engine design is inspired on LLAMA http://db.disi.unitn.eu/pages/VLDBProgram/pdf/research/p853-..., Bwtree - > https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7655/9c6cc259c6ab5baf7bd19d... and schema-agnostic indexing techniques -> http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol8/p1668-shukla.pdf. Please note that these papers are significantly behind the current state of the implementation. The most crucial aspect that these papers dont cover is the integration of the database engine with the larger distributed system components of Cosmos DB including the resource governance, partition management, and the implementation of replication protocol /consistency models etc. Our goal is to publish all of the design specifications including TLA+ specs over time.