Sphinx (search engine)
Open-source full-text search server for high-performance text indexing and retrieval
About Sphinx (search engine)
Sphinx is a powerful full-text search engine designed to provide fast and scalable text search capabilities. It supports batch and real-time indexing, SQL-like querying via SphinxQL, and integration with databases like MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL. Sphinx is dual-licensed under GPLv2 and a proprietary license, with version 3 transitioning to proprietary. It powers large-scale applications like Craigslist and Boardreader, handling billions of documents and queries efficiently.
FAQ
Official implementations of SphinxAPI are available for PHP, Java, Perl, Ruby, and Python. Unofficial implementations for other languages and third-party plugins are also available.
Yes, Sphinx can be used as a storage engine (SphinxSE) for MySQL and MariaDB. It allows these databases to communicate with Sphinx's searchd to run queries and obtain results. SphinxSE is shipped with MariaDB.
Up until version 3, Sphinx was dual-licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 or a proprietary license. Since version 3, Sphinx has become proprietary, with a promise to release its source code in the future.
Sphinx offers indexing speeds of up to 10-15 MB/sec per core and HDD, and searching speeds of over 500 queries/sec against a 1,000,000 document/1.2 GB collection using a 2-core desktop system with 2 GB of RAM.
Yes, Sphinx supports JSON attributes since version 2.1.1-beta. This allows for flexible schema handling, where different documents can have varying keys without requiring a fixed structure.
Sphinx is used by platforms such as Craigslist.org, Tradebit.com, vBulletin.com, Boardreader.com, and others. Craigslist serves over 300,000,000 queries per day.
Yes, in 2017, key members of the original Sphinx team forked the project under the name Manticore. Manticore continues to be released as open source under version 3 of the GPL.
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