tl/dr: The technology we started building against (Titan) is probably dead. We're reopening the investigation for a backing technology.
Yesterday
DataStax announced that they'd
acquired ThinkAurelius, the company for whom almost all the Titan developers work. The
ZDNet article 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.
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.