DataStax Inc. yesterday announced the general availability of DataStax Enterprise (DSE) 5.0, its database for cloud applications that’s based on the open-source NoSQL database, Apache Cassandra.

DataStax’s software, which the company describes as “always on”, also leverages other open-source technologies including Apache Hadoop, the Apache Spark data processing engine ,and Apache Solr, a search platform for enterprises. Integration with Spark and Hadoop were introduced back in June 2014 in DSE 4.5.

DSE 5.0, along with DataStax OpsCenter 6.0, a web-based visual management and monitoring tool that also hit availability yesterday, provides a comprehensive and easy-to-use data management layer for enterprises, the company said.

“DataStax Enterprise 5.0 offers a certified version of Cassandra 3.0 and advanced functionality designed to accelerate the creation of intelligent and compelling data-intensive applications,” the company said in a news release.

In a more detailed blog post, DataStax executive Robin Schumacher revealed that DSE 5.0 is “the largest release in our company’s history, both in terms of major new functionality and improvements to existing capabilities”.

Continuing, Schumacher said the company has two main goals with its new release – to deliver a multi-model database platform that’s able to support the multi-faceted management needs of modern cloud apps; and to simplify the development, protection, management and monitoring of DSE so cloud apps can be brought to market, secured and maintained more rapidly and easily.

Squaring up to Oracle

The key new feature in DSE 5.0 that DataStax seems very keen to talk about is DataStax Enterprise Graph (DSE Graph), a new real-time ‘graph database’ for cloud apps. In a statement, DataStax explained that the tool was “inspired by the open-source TitanDB graph database”, which the company took a big stake in after acquiring its main developer, a firm called Aurelius, last year.

Graph databases work by establishing relationships between data elements in a way that shortcuts the need to traverse relational tables. For example, a graph database can link together products in a catalog to various customer types to identify the likelihood that a person who buys one product will also buy another. In the same way it can look for activity patterns that are typical of fraudulent credit card use.

“Some people call graph databases whiteboard-friendly,” Matthias Broecheler, a managing partner at Aurelius, told SiliconANGLE last year. “The data model can be directly implemented in the database. You don’t have to map relationships into tables.”

Graph databases are rapidly gaining popularity among enterprises in the NoSQL space, as evidenced by the recent release of of Neo Technology’s Neo4j 3.0 database, and the acceptance of Apache TinkerPop as a new Top-level project by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). TinkerPop was actually donated to the ASF by DataStax, having originally been developed by Aurelius.

Matt Pfiel, chief customer officer and co-founder of DataStax, was very bullish about the likely impact of DSE Graph when he spoke to The Register last week.

“DataStax Enterprise Graph is to Neo4j as Cassandra is to MySQL,” Pfiel said, adding that DataStax is focused on becoming the single “best database for cloud in the world”.

This bullishness is of course directed at DataStax’s real rivals, the likes of Oracle and Microsoft. DataStax hopes to one day replace those incumbents at the top of the database world, and DSE Graph is designed to help out with that push, as it’s well suited for many of the same use cases. The new DSE Graph possesses the Cassandra database’s key-value and tabular data models, JSON/document models and graph, which means that each model inherits the key benefits of Cassandra, combined with the enterprise grade functionality of DSE 5.0.

DSE 5.0 was released yesterday, and can be downloaded from the DataStax website.

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