Tim's Weblog
Tim Strehle’s links and thoughts on Web apps, software development and Digital Asset Management, since 2002.
2006-11-23

Sphinx - Free open-source SQL full-text search engine

SphinxGenerally, it's a standalone search engine, meant to provide fast, size-efficient and relevant fulltext search functions to other applications. Sphinx was specially designed to integrate well with SQL databases and scripting languages. Currently built-in data source drivers support fetching data either via direct connection to MySQL, PostgreSQL, or from a pipe in a custom XML format.

Sphinx features

- high indexing speed (upto 10 MB/sec on modern CPUs); - high search speed (avg query is under 0.1 sec on 2-4 GB text collections); - high scalability (upto 100 GB of text, upto 100 M documents on a single CPU);"