tl/dr: The technology we started building against (Titan) is probably
dead. We're reopening the investigation for a backing technology.
Yesterday DataStax <http://www.datastax.com/> announced
<http://www.datastax.com/2015/02/datastax-acquires-aurelius-the-experts-behind-titandb>
that they'd acquired
<http://www.datastax.com/2015/02/datastax-acquires-aurelius-the-experts-behind-titandb>
ThinkAurelius <http://thinkaurelius.com/>, the company for whom almost all
the Titan developers work. The ZDNet article
<http://www.zdnet.com/article/datastax-snaps-up-aurelius-and-its-titan-team-to-build-new-graph-database/>
made it pretty clear that they are killing the project
"We're not going to do an integration. The
play here is we'll take
everything that's been done on Titan as inspiration, and maybe some of the
Titan project will make it into DSE Graph," DataStax engineering VP Martin
Van Ryswyk said.
While its certainly possible that someone from the community will come out
of the woodwork and continue Titan its now lost almost all of its top
developers. It looks like there is some secret succession discussions
going on but I'm not holding out hope that anything will come of it. This
pretty much blows this project's schedule of having a hardware request by
the end of the month and a publicly released beta at the end of March.
Anyway, we're reopening the investigation to pick a new backend. We're
including more options than we had before as its become clear that open
source graph databases is a bit of a wild west space. But there are people
waiting on this. The developer summit made that clear. So we're not going
to do the month long dive into each choice like we did last time. I'm not
100% sure exactly what we'll do but I can assure you we'll be careful.
I know you might want to talk about other options - you may as well stuff
them on
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/Indexing#Other_possible_candidates
and we'll get to them. As always, you can check out our workboard
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/board/37/query/DwEBx9K4vaHo/> to
see what we're actually working on.
Titan is still in the running assuming it gets active maintainers.
OrientDB, which we evaluated last round, is still in there too. So too are
GraphX and Neo4j. And ArangoDB. And Magnus' WDQ. We'd get much more
involved in maintenance, I think. And writing a TinkerPop implementation
Elasticsearch. That's not a serious contender. It'd get geo support for
free but its really just a low bar to compare all the other options to.
Thanks,
Nik <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T88550>