Sphinx notes

From Helpful
Jump to navigation Jump to search
The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.
This article/section is a stub — probably a pile of half-sorted notes and is probably a first version, is not well-checked, so may have incorrect bits. (Feel free to ignore, or tell me)

Sphinx is a fast, fairly scalable search engine written in C++.

(not to be confused with Sphinx, the documentation generator)


When inevitably compared to Lucene / Solr, Sphinx is a little simpler - both simpler to set up (Solr can take a lot of reading up, particuarly if you've not used Java before), and simpler in features.

The speed and core abilities are similar, but sphinx currently isn't so polished, doesn't have as many support scripts, and makes you deal with its guts occasionally.

For basic text search you can get started pretty easily (probably a little faster than with Solr), but faceting and other clever indexing can be more work (depending on your wishes), updating indexes is slightly more manual -- nothing you can't automate or work out once and then forget, but (like Solr) you may need to do a bunch of reading first.


Indexing, searching

This article/section is a stub — probably a pile of half-sorted notes and is probably a first version, is not well-checked, so may have incorrect bits. (Feel free to ignore, or tell me)


Indexing

Searching

Sources

xmlpipe, xmlpipe2

Points to a command that provides documents to index in XML form.

xmlpipe is limited to 2 fixed fields and 2 fixed attributes, xmlpipe2 is more flexible. Both use custom XML structures - different ones. Chances are that you probably just want to choose xmlpipe2.

See also:

SQL database

Useful when complementing things like forums that store all their data in such a database.

mysql, pgsql, mssql, odbc

You need to configure how columns map to document fields and attributes (and which attribute types should be used for each attribute column).

See also:

Distributed indexing/search

SphinxSE

See also