Sphinx (search engine)

Sphinx is a free software search engine designed with indexing database content in mind. It currently supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, and ODBC-compliant databases as data sources natively. Other data sources can be indexed via pipe in a custom XML format. It is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version two or a proprietary license.^[1]

Starting from version 0.9.9, querying is possible using SphinxQL, a subset of SQL. Starting from version 1.10-beta, both incremental (via Real-Time backend^[2]) and batch indexing is supported.

Sphinx is implemented by more than 100 web sites and services, including Craigslist.org.^[3]

Features

• Batch and incremental (soft real-time) full-text indexing.
• Support for non-text attributes (scalars, strings, sets).
• Direct indexing of SQL databases. Native support for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL, plus ODBC connectivity.
• XML documents indexing support
• Distributed searching support out of the box.
• Integration via access APIs
• SQL-like syntax support via MySQL protocol (since 0.9.9)
• Full-text searching syntax.
• Database-like result set processing.
• Relevance ranking utilizing additional factors besides standard BM25.
• Text processing support for SBCS and UTF-8 encodings, stopwords, indexing of words known not to appear in the database ("hitless"), stemming, word forms, tokenizing exceptions, and "blended characters" (dual-indexing as both a real character and a word separator).
• supports UDF (since 2.0.1)

Performance and scalability

• Indexing speed of up to 10-15 MB/sec per core and HDD.
• Searching speed of up to 200-300 queries/sec against 1,000,000-document, 1.2 GB collection.
• Biggest known production instances indexes 8.1 billion documents,^[4] busiest known one (craigslist) serves over 50,000,000 queries/day

See also

• Xapian

References

1. ^ ^{a b} "Commercial licensing". http://sphinxsearch.com/licensing.html. Retrieved 2010-02-24. 
2. ^ "RT-index manual". Sphinx Technologies Inc.. http://sphinxsearch.com/docs/current.html#rt-indexes. Retrieved 29 October 2011. 
3. ^ "Powered by Sphinx". Sphinx Technologies Inc.. http://sphinxsearch.com/info/powered/. Retrieved 1 April 2011. 
4. ^ http://www.infegy.com

External links

• http://sphinxsearch.com/

Further reading

• Aksyonoff, Andrew (2011). Introduction to Search with Sphinx: From installation to relevance tuning. O'Reilly Media. ISBN 978-0-596-80955-3. http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596809539.do. 
• Ali, Abbas (2011). Sphinx Search Beginner's Guide. Birmingham, England: Packt Publishing. ISBN 978-1-84951-254-1. http://www.packtpub.com/sphinx-search-beginners-guide/book.