

Sphinx 0.9.9-rc2 is out - m03p
http://sphinxsearch.com/news/37.html
Latest release of the sphinx full text search engine
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Xichekolas
<http://sphinxsearch.com/docs/current.html#sphinxql> (connect directly to
searchd with any MySQL client)

That might be the coolest feature I've ever heard of. I want to play around
with Sphinx now just to use that. For those that know SQL, SphinxQL should
make getting up and running rather painless.

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thorax
I hadn't seen this feature, that does sound quite cool. Thanks for calling it
out.

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samueladam
Anyone implementing sphinxsearch care to share their experience with us?

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thorax
Sure thing.

We have a customized sphinxsearch engine powering bug.gd. We can't say enough
good things about it. Actually, out of all the open source stack we use, I
think I'm most pleased with how robust and solid that piece is specifically.
Sphinx is one of those powerful little open source gems that people don't
discuss enough. It feels very feature rich and is wicked fast. I don't
understand why it gets so little attention overall.

Its reindexing speed is especially good-- I highly recommend it for any
service that needs their search index updated quickly. A reindex of 100,000
documents takes about a second-- just fast enough that we could actually do a
full reindex on every search if we were that silly.

Supposedly you'll also find it behind craigslist's new search backend and
(supposedly) the new whitehouse.gov.

The selfish inkling in me doesn't like talking about Sphinx because it feels
like one of those "best kept secrets" that you'd just want to keep to enjoy
for yourself-- of course that's silly.

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stephenjudkins
We looked at Sphinx but ultimately decided to use Solr/Lucene instead. There
were a couple reasons:

* We're not doing fulltext search, but searching by a set of tags that we didn't want tokenized/stemmed. Doing this with Lucene was easy, while trying to get Sphinx to work this way really seemed like it was going against the grain.

* The incremental update support seemed a whole lot simpler in Lucene than it was in Sphinx. The exact same stuff might be going on under the hood, but adding new documents seems to "just work" in Solr with less worrying about the implementation details.

From everything I've seen, Sphinx's performance is excellent and it's very
well-suited to fulltext search. It just seems a little less flexible than
Lucene.

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mronge
How does it compare to Lucene? I use Lucene alot and it fricking rocks.

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m03p
Performance wise they seem pretty similar (althoug I couldn't find any up to
date benchmarks), feature wise it depends on what you are looking for. Sphinx
has aggregate support and lucene can update the index (sphinx can "only" merge
deltas).

If you don't use java already I would always go for sphinx, java adds allot of
dependencies/"things you have to take care of".

One neat feature added in this release is that you can connect to sphinx using
any mysql client. So there is no need for a specialized client api and you can
use it with everything (literally).

