DataStax Eyes Graph Database Support with Aurelius Acquisition

Big data company DataStax is hoping to bolster its appeal in the NoSQL, Internet of Things (IoT), Web and mobile markets through its acquisition this week of Aurelius, the company behing the open source Titan graph database. The move adds graph database capabilities to DataStax’s big data platform.

DataStax’s core business is built around Apache Cassandra, an open source, distributed database platform designed to deliver high availability and scalability. The company’s acquisition of Aurelius, which develops the Titan graph database, will allow it to introduce DataStax Enterprise Graph to its big data platform, expanding the graph database capabilities of the software.

Graph databases complement Cassandra’s functionality by performing well in situations that require high database scalability. By integrating them into its big data platform, DataStax said it will be able to offer a more comprehensive data discovery and management suite.

DataStax will become “the only unified distributed database management platform to include graph, analytics, search and in-memory capabilities,” the company said in a statement announcing its acquisition of Aurelius.

By extension, the company said, DataStax’s new graph database capabilities will help to encourage adoption of its NoSQL storage solutions, which it believes are particularly useful in IoT, Web and mobile applications that demand much greater scalability and higher performance than relational databases support.

“At DataStax, we understand that the nature of transactional applications has changed in today’s radically connected and highly distributed world,” said Billy Bosworth, CEO, DataStax. “Accordingly, we purpose built our unified database platform to offer businesses the capability to apply the right database technology to the appropriate use case. Graph capabilities on top of Cassandra”s power and scale is [sic] an exciting step forward for our customers, and we are delighted to bring the brilliant graph minds at Aurelius to the DataStax team.”