TITAN: Distributed Graph Database - Real-Time, Transactional, Open-Source

OVERVIEW

Titan is one piece of the Aurelius Graph Cluster, which also includes Faunus and Fulgora.

Titan is an OLTP distributed graph database capable of supporting tens of thousands of concurrent users interacting with a single massive-scale graph represented over a cluster of machines. The current distribution’s pluggable storage architecture provides connectivity to Apache Cassandra, Apache HBase, and Oracle’s BerkeleyDB. Titan is a native Blueprints enabled graph database and as such, it supports the full TinkerPop stack of technologies.

Faunus is an OLAP analytics engine for processing property graphs using Hadoop. Graphs are analyzed using a MapReduce implementation of the Gremlin graph traversal language. General use-cases include computing graph derivations/transformations and global graph statistics. Faunus can be extended with new operations written using MapReduce and Blueprints. Titan connectivity is provided to allow for the global analysis of Titan graphs.

Fulgora is a compression-based, transaction-less, in-memory graph processor capable of storing billions of edges within the memory confines of a single machine. Fulgora is optimized for the execution of massively threaded, global graph algorithms. Algorithms are written using the Blueprints graph API. [coming end of winter 2012]

QUICKSTART

Get Titan up and running on your local computer in 4 easy steps.

To download Titan, unzip it, and start Titan Server on the localhost, execute the following 4 shell commands:

$ wget http://s3.thinkaurelius.com/downloads/titan/titan-cassandra-0.3.0.zip
$ unzip titan-cassandra-0.3.0.zip
$ cd titan-cassandra-0.3.0
$ sudo bin/titan.sh config/titan-server-rexster.xml config/titan-server-cassandra.properties
...
13/03/27 12:40:35 INFO server.RexProRexsterServer: RexPro serving on port: [8184]
13/03/27 12:40:35 INFO server.HttpRexsterServer: Rexster Server running on: [http://localhost:8182]
13/03/27 12:40:35 INFO server.ShutdownManager: Bound shutdown socket to /127.0.0.1:8183. Starting listener thread for shutdown requests.
...

Titan Server embeds both Cassandra and a lightweight version of Rexster within the same JVM. You can connect to Titan from any programming language because Titan Server exposes the following language-agnostic endpoints:

A HTTP RESTful endpoint available at http://localhost:8182/graphs
CRUD operations can be enacted via HTTP and JSON.
A RexPro binary protocol endpoint available on port 8184.
Arbitrarily complex Gremlin read/write operations can be enacted via MessagePack.

See the Titan Wiki for the complete manual, including the Getting Started Guide and the Titan introduction video presented by Matthias.

AURELIUS

Aurelius is the team of computer scientists and world-class software engineers behind Titan and the Aurelius Graph Cluster.

Dr. Matthias Broecheler is the lead developer of the distributed graph database Titan and has researched large scale graph database systems for more than 5 years. His award-winning research includes high performance index structures and query answering algorithms for graph structured data. In addition, he developed the Probabilistic Similarity Logic (PSL) machine learning framework to analyze and reason about multi-relational data. Matthias holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland.
Stephen Mallette has been developing commercial software for about fifteen years, with most of those years focused on healthcare-based applications. He is a primary contributor to the TinkerPop stack and the lead developer of Rexster, a graph server. Stephen also maintains the GremlinDocs website, which offers learn-by-example documentation of the Gremlin graph traversal language. He received his Bachelor of Science in Management Information Systems and Decision Sciences from George Mason University.
Dr. Marko Rodriguez has focused his academic and commercial career on graph theory, network science, and graph-system architecture and development. He is a TinkerPop co-founder and serves as the lead developer of the Gremlin graph traversal language. Marko received his Bachelors in Cognitive Science from UC San Diego, his Masters and Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Santa Cruz and was a Director’s Fellow at the Center for Nonlinear Studies of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Contact Aurelius to find out about its support offerings.

TINKERPOP

TinkerPop is a developers group that has built much of the open-source software stack for the emerging graph database landscape.

The TinkerPop toolkit is a sophisticated suite of graph-based technologies to which many of the members of Aurelius contribute. The TinkerPop stack is utilized in all of the Aurelius-specific products.