Is it "safe" to use TitanDB?

Question

Following the acquisition of Aurelius by DataStax, and since Titan 1.0.0 was released in September 2015 and received very few commits since then, I wonder whether it is safe to use TitanDB in production. Can anyone please give some insight?

Propulsion

There is a Titan 1.1 branch that seems to have recent updates and a few active pull requests against it. github.com/thinkaurelius/titan/tree/titan11 – Secretarial

Answer 1

We are running a Titan graph, on top of HBase, with about 30TBs of data, and a lot of features are missing.

For example, a must-have is the ability to perform OLAP operations on the graph, such as deleting redundant vertices using Spark.

Although it seems like Tinkerpop is going that way using its SparkGraphComputer, it does not work well - the implementations of reading data from HBase using Hadoop InputFormat is buggy, and a lot of scenarios are not handled (for example, a vertex that is connected to itself in a loop makes the code raise an exception and terminate). In addition, the efficiency of the sections that parse vertices from raw data is just bad - a lot of buffer allocations that are redundant and make everything slow.

If you are planning on a big graph for the long term, I don't think Titan is suitable - unless you are going to contibute code by your own.

Institutionalism

Quick followup... What would be the best solution today for a massive graph database (ie. list of all topics in the world, with the words commonly found to describe them)? – Tacklind

In my opinion - the existing graphs aren't ready yet. I am looking for a solution that can store the graph itself, but also has a strong community that can be helpful when needed. This reason led me to Elasticsearch -- currently I am building a Graph Database over Elasticsearch. Any other alternative that I have checked was not good enough. – Institutionalism

in the future, I see Dgraph being a solid contender as they truly listen to the community for adding new features, but it's indeed far from being production-ready... let's see... thanks for the update! – Tacklind

@Institutionalism - can you update us on this? Are you still using Titan? – Pieeyed

I second @Pieeyed question, if imriqwe would be so kind to update us on what he's moved on to. – Infant

I am currently in the process of migrating from Titan to Elasticsearch as a Graph Database. This project is in its beginning, I will elaborate as soon as I'll have news :) – Institutionalism

Answer 2

Apparently TitanDB has been forked and now is JanusGraph, here is an article about it.

Leucotomy

Answer 3

[EDITED 28 April 2017 to note that Titan is indeed dead; JanusGraph is a fork of Titan and very much healthy]

I know of several groups using Titan in production, including people at IBM and Amazon. Is it safe? Absolutely, if you have staff that can support it. (Shameless plug: my company will help you with that.) Will Titan's development continue? TinkerPop development is still moving very fast, though contributions to core Titan are now mostly coming from non-Aurelius programmers.

I'd argue if you're a fan of Titan's approach because of your data sizes or velocities, you should be looking at moving to DataStax's new graph database when it's released sometime this year. Work on that proceeds at a feverish pace from what I can tell talking to the ex-Aurelius guys at various conferences. If you do your work in Titan 1.0 (or 1.1, which isn't far) using TinkerPop 3, then it should be a straightforward transition to DSE Graph. This is what we are suggesting to our clients who need to manage very large data loads.

Liability

fast enough but its github pages still suggest TinkerPop 3.1.0 is still to be released as a reason for partial hadoop 2 support... – Lardon

Answer 4

It is NOT safe to use TitanDB at the moment because main maintainers dropped it and the last commit was over a year ago. The company was acquired by Datastax and the team was shifted to work on their DSE Graph. Though, few fellows run Titan 1.0 on production.

A natural alternative is JanusGraph which is essentially a well maintained re-branded fork of the unofficially released Titan v1.1. Check their Github repo.

https://github.com/JanusGraph/janusgraph

Kenner